[the-dude]

Around the year 2000, a PIC 12C508A was about 1 Dutch guilder @ 5000 pcs.

Today, Mouser lists 1 pcs @ € 0,908, 100 pcs @ € 0,863.

The guilder/€ is 2,20371 ( muscle memory ).

The MCUs in the article are 12C508A class, one is an actual clone.

So for ~ € 0,80 at quantity, the 12C508A currently costs about 1.75 guilder. 20 years later.

[childintime]

I wonder how much of Microchip revenue is from old chips at very profitable prices.

I did a Digikey comparison once, and Microchip alone provided roughly 30% of all MCUs on digikey. It has, for example, an incredible 175 MCU models with exactly 64B of RAM, 1.75KB of ROM and just 5 I/Os.

[zokier]

That is just combinatorial explosion of fairly small number of features. I took a peek at the example you provided, and drilling down there seems to be for example 39 SKUs for PIC12x615 chip:

* Two voltage options (although why on earth do they need 2-5.5 and 2-5 separately?)

* Two main packaging options: tape and tube, and tape is furthermore available as full reel, digireel, and cut tape

* Three different temperature ratings

* Five different device packages from tiny 3x3mm DFN to full-sized DIP

So already from these fairly simple options you get total of 2x4x3x5 = 120 different combinations for essentially the same chip. So they don't quite have all the combinations, but there are few outlier options and overall the combination coverage is pretty wide which explains the inflated SKU count. I'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn from this exercise besides that Microchip seem to be willing to provide their chips exactly as customer wants them.