Sponsored Silicon Tier · for MCU vendors
The eval board is dead.It just hasn't shipped yet.
You ship a dev board in five days. Your competitor's part is already inside the agent's context window — compiled, running, passing tests. VirtMCU is a distribution channel for the hour that now belongs to a machine: the first hour of every evaluation, the one nobody at your company has ever been able to see.
The channel you spend the most on is the one you cannot see.
Every evaluation of your MCU begins the same way: a board leaves a warehouse and vanishes. You don't know whether it was unboxed. You don't know which peripheral the engineer gave up on, or on which register. You don't know what part they chose instead, or why.
You paid for the silicon, the assembly, the fulfilment, the customs form, and the desk drawer it is currently sitting in. What you did not buy is a single bit of information.
Firmware is being written by agents. Agents take the path of least resistance.
If an agent can pull your part, compile against it, execute it, and verify the result without a human plugging anything in, it will use your part. If your part requires a human, a board, and a week of waiting, the agent routes around you — silently, and before anyone in your sales org knows the opportunity existed.
You don't have to believe an agent will buy your chip. You only have to believe the first hour of the evaluation now belongs to a machine. Being present in that hour costs a bring-up fee and a budget you control. Being absent costs the design-in.
An instruction-accurate model of your MCU, served to the agent directly.
VirtMCU is a deterministic simulator for your microcontroller, delivered over MCP — the protocol AI coding agents already speak. The agent discovers your part, writes firmware for it, executes it against a faithful model of your core and peripherals, reads back real register state, and iterates until the tests pass. No board. No bench. No shipping. No waiting.
The Sponsored Silicon Tier is the commercial form of that: you underwrite the compute for your part, and your part becomes free — in every configuration, to every developer and every agent on the platform. Everything else on VirtMCU stays paid. Yours is the one that costs nothing to try.
| Parameter | Sym | Physical eval board | VirtMCU sponsored tier | Unit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost to you, per evaluation | C ev | 50 – 150 landed | 5 | USD |
| Evaluations per $1,000 of channel spend | N ev | 7 – 20 | 200 | count |
| Time to first working firmware | t fw | days – weeks | seconds | — |
| Marginal cost of 10,000 more evaluations | ΔC | linear | a budget slider | — |
| Reachable by an autonomous agent | A | No | Yes | — |
| Visibility into what happened during the evaluation | V | Not measurable | Full trace | — |
| Recoverable after the developer gives up | R | No | Yes | — |
Note 1: Physical figures are landed cost per board — silicon, assembly, fulfilment, duty — and exclude the cost of the design-in you never learn you lost.
Note 2: The sponsored rate is flat across every configuration, including multi-node Thread, Matter and SDV meshes. There is no premium tier.
We are not selling you a mailing list. We are selling you a telescope.
Because the evaluation now happens on instrumented infrastructure instead of on a desk you cannot see, the channel stops being dark. For the first time:
- Which of your parts get evaluated — and which get abandoned mid-evaluation.
- Which peripheral the agent stalls on. The exact block. The exact register sequence.
- Which documentation gaps and errata are costing you design-ins, ranked by frequency.
- Which competing part the workload moved to when yours didn't work.
No board has ever reported any of this back to you, because boards don't report. This is the asset. The free tier is just how we acquire it.
Opt-in and aggregate by design. We report design-in intelligence to you — not surveillance of individual developers.
We need your reference manual. Nothing behind it.
Models are built from your public reference manual and datasheet. No RTL. No netlist. No test vectors. No confidential design data changes hands, and none is required. Your team is welcome to review the finished model and certify it — the same status you would grant a third-party BSP. If there is a block you would rather we not model, we don't model it.
Two line items. Neither one goes through your engineering org.
Bring-up
You send the reference manual. We build and verify the model of your core and its peripherals. Once it exists, it exists permanently — it does not need to be rebuilt, re-shipped, or re-stocked.
Sponsored compute
You underwrite the evaluations of your part at a flat $5 each — roughly 200 per $1,000, any configuration. Turn it up for a launch, down between them, off whenever you like. The ceiling is hard: we stop at your number, and you are never billed past it.
— a single hour of your engineers' time
— a revenue-share agreement
— a procurement cycle
— a seat in your CRM
When an agent or a developer is ready to buy, we hand them straight to your existing storefront or distributor link. We don't sit in the transaction.
Name one part. We'll bring it up before you commit to anything.
Pick a single MCU — ideally one you're being asked to move volume on. We will model it and send you a recording of an agent writing, compiling, running, and validating firmware on it, start to finish, unattended, with no human touching a keyboard. Then decide whether the rest of this is worth a meeting.
Pick a part →