The post makes no mention of the actual MCU being used, they just note that it's interesting that the pinout matches the often-cloned PIC12. It's one additional piece of evidence hinting that it's probably an MCU die in there, rather than some kind of ASIC.
> There are rectangular regular areas that look like memory, there is a large area in the center with small random looking structure, looking like synthesized logic and some part that look like hand-crafted analog.
And the PIC12 is known to be a source of inspiration for dirt-cheap Chinese microcontrollers, see for example [0].
Hard evidence? No. But if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck...
I'll take the article's word about the PIC12 devices, but there are plenty of chips from Atmel, NXP, and TI that match that form factor. Plus the whole universe of Chinese clones.
Just seemed like a rather large leap to assert based on pad pattern alone. /shrug. Whatever. Not really that important.
