Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and a new micro-controller with RISC-V and Arm?

And here's the def con badge. Powered by Raspberry Pi.

Yup, you're right.

I wish they would reconsider the pitch for future ICs. I guess coming from a mobile phone sort of customer history, they tend to go for the small sizes!

I wonder if many of their RP2040 customers really care for such a small pitch. Industrial customers wouldn't care if it was larger (if that's the sort of customers they are going to aim for, with their PIO protocol capabilities). Makes it less yield for their customers surely since there's no solder mask between the pads (or at least unreliable solder mask that fine).

Also, I wonder who will want the 56-pin variant, since the 80-pin offers a lot more GPIO (if the prices are similar! maybe there will be some price differentiation : ( I wonder if it's two different dies, since usually the GPIO takes up a fair bit of space on the silicon.

I think their target market is people who integrate the chips into something else.

So either the Pico form factor is fine or you can afford/use an automated assembly process.

If you don't ask me any questions, then I can say I am done reading the chip's datasheet...

Yes, my own design. Oh, I was hopeful first after reading your text and no such luck.

Yes. That’s the clever / weird thing with this. They (rpi) are hedging their bet. ARM is safe. RiscV is (hah) risky. Users can choose and they win either way   

I mean it's just another annoyance, because industrial customers won't be fine-tuning their processes to the extreme like mobile phone manufacturers for hundreds of thousands of boards, and so they may well have a lower yield in production (i.e. automated assembly), with packages with no solder mask, or higher risk of broken solder mask, with fine pitch QFN.

I appreciate it's sometimes hard to design with the most reliable packages exclusively, sometimes manufacturers are forced to use tiny packages if that's all that is available if it meets their requirement in all other ways. But, adding another small package unnecessarily to a board design is only going to decrease the yield further. I'm struggling to find any high-performance ST microcontroller that is only available in such a fine pitch package, and they must have many industrial customers. Presumably ST customers are asking for the larger pitch.

I suppose it could be worse, rpi.org could have gone with 0.35mm pitch or lower.

Or if one doesn't have any plans to read the datasheet at all, is it fair to say they are done reading it?  If so I am done reading it too.   

<speculation> Also, just noticed that, if desired, the CPUs can be permanently selected to be ARM or RISC-V, by setting a one-time-programmable (OTP) register, ARCHSEL. Now I'm wondering if their plan could be to sell some of the chips with the register pre-programmed, i.e. reduce unnecessary ARM royalties if they have customers who exclusively want RISC-V anyway. Must be such a tiny cost though. Or maybe there are customers that ARM forbids selling to.