All chip manufacturers are alike in this respect, unfortunately. That whole industry believes that they thrive on secrecy and that simply properly speccing their hardware would already be a massive competitive risk.

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inferiorhuman 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Nah, it's a spectrum. Companies like NXP and Infineon are at one end. NXP wants a ton of personal information to access even the most basic docs on some of its chips, sometimes even an NDA. Infineon won't even acknowledge you for the most part.

Companies like STM, RP, and TI are at the other end. STM got super popular because they're cheap and the documentation is incredibly easy to get at. I think RP is following suit.

Renesas puts out some documentation, but it's really rough. Anything that has even a whiff of crypto is completely undocumented. They're also squatting on a few Rust crates where Espressif actually hired a Rust developer to work on their Rust HAL. The most comical thing is that while they version their reference manual they don't seem to update it and instead issue a ton of broad errata that apply to multiple manuals.

Before the acquisition Atmel's documentation was well written and organized.

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jacquesm 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That's fair. Even so, the majority of the companies whose chips I would consider for specialized electronics seem to be so far down on the paranoid spectrum that it hinders their business.

	▲	inferiorhuman 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, some do, but some are coming around and some were never there. Which is why it's important for a company like Adafruit to pick a manufacturer that is towards the open end of the spectrum. Unfortunately NXP isn't that manufacturer even if their silicon is more powerful.