Don't care about NDAs as much. At least not as much as about cut tape availability at the usual distributors. I'm fine as long as I can buy 100 chips at mouser instead of buying an obscure reel in shenzen (as might be the case for hdmi transceivers btw). They mentioned a couple chip manufacturers in the announcement, so I'm hoping they will follow through with that, or at the least, make modules available.
The same has been going on for digital radio recently. Only silabs have decent chips at 10€ per piece in single quantities, the rest is all large modules and obsolete chips that are all "not recommended for new designs".
Same for Bluetooth. CSR is quite hard to reach, chips are NDAed, and chip programmers and documentation is hard to get by unless you go the aliexpress route. Then suddenly the modules are easier to place on my PCB than the chip, amazingly cheap, and even the programmers are available as knockoffs for 50 dollars instead of 800.
It sometimes feels unprofessional to seemingly tack random Chinese Lego blocks onto each other, but apparently that's how the industry runs. I've even stopped mocking huge Javascript libraries recently, in sheer appreciation of this realisation ;-)
The same has been going on for digital radio recently. Only silabs have decent chips at 10€ per piece in single quantities, the rest is all large modules and obsolete chips that are all "not recommended for new designs".
Same for Bluetooth. CSR is quite hard to reach, chips are NDAed, and chip programmers and documentation is hard to get by unless you go the aliexpress route. Then suddenly the modules are easier to place on my PCB than the chip, amazingly cheap, and even the programmers are available as knockoffs for 50 dollars instead of 800.
It sometimes feels unprofessional to seemingly tack random Chinese Lego blocks onto each other, but apparently that's how the industry runs. I've even stopped mocking huge Javascript libraries recently, in sheer appreciation of this realisation ;-)