I take that back, the entry stm32 cortex M4 is the F3 series starting with the stm32f301 which approaches $1 in volume on digikey. The stm32f301 comes with a 12bit DAC which is worth close to $1 on it's own. Assuming one requires a hardware DAC, it's almost like you're getting the 72Mhz cortex M4 with it's FPU and all for $1 or less, pure insanity...infiniteneslives wrote:The baseline stm32 with M4 is the stm32f401 but prob want to go with the stm32f410 which includes a DAC which goes for $2.60 in modest volumes (1k) on digkey. Crazy the beasts of mcu's you can get now for so little money... When you consider that a legit independent 12bit DAC runs ~$1, the M4 core is only costing ~$1.60...
These low cost beefy cortex mcus with their included DAC is what makes it more cost effective to implement expansion synths on an mcu vs FPGA. The stm32 series offer a number of 5v tolerant i/o to boot which can help simplify glue logic considerably.