An explainer, written at the bench
The Bench is an independent write-up site about chips, the machines that program them, and the systems built around both.
Everything here is written to be true in five years. That rules out a great deal: no news, no market forecasts, no shortage reports, no rankings of who is currently best at anything. What is left is the part of the subject that does not move — what a microcontroller is, how memory differs from memory, what a programmer does when it writes, and why a board that works on the bench sometimes does not work in a box.
What this is not
Not a manufacturer. Not a distributor. Not a reseller. Nothing here is for sale, nothing is recommended over anything else, and there is no catalogue behind any of it. Where a family or an interface is named — PIC, AVR, Cortex-M, ESP32, JTAG, SWD — it is named because it teaches something, not because it is stocked.
How the pages are written
Every diagram on this site is generic. The interactive package on the homepage teaches pin classes; it is not a pinout, and it says so in its caption. Where a figure would need a real number — a voltage, a timing, a pin position — the page explains the principle instead and sends you to the manufacturer’s documentation, which is the only document that can be right about the part on your desk.
Read-out protection is covered as a concept: what it is for, and what it costs you in test and service. It is not covered as a method, and it will not be.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, it is worth fixing. Write in — the correction matters more than the page.
Supporters
A strip of supporters sits at the foot of the homepage. They pay for the lamp, not for the words: they do not see pages before they go up, and nothing on this site is a review, a ranking or a recommendation.