Baochip: What It Is, Why I'm Doing It Now, and How It Came About

Baochip-1x is a crowdfunded microcontroller whose key differentiator is the inclusion of a Memory Management Unit (MMU), a feature absent from other microcontrollers in its performance class. The author argues that the MMU's decades-old page-based virtual memory scheme remains essential for secure, loadable apps and is composable with newer protection technologies like CHERI and PMP. Historically, embedded CPUs omitted MMUs due to transistor and memory constraints dating back to the ARM7TDMI era, but the author sees no reason to continue that convention.