Microchip vs Atmel

[Horsedorf]

48MHz becomes 24MHz. sure, and you don't need a crystal for most apps.

I know some things get well and truly divided down. Some instructions can be 13 cycles. But it sure is easy to use. Once you set something going it runs in the background, often in all in hardware with little or no interrupt suport required.
If you want a PWM (or 2), or a D-A it just works. Write a new value to a register and you are done.
Development system is tiny. Signals don't get corrupted by long wiring (unless you add heaps your self)
I gladly paid for a good C compiler. Libraries give instant results.
I am not a biased one eyed supporter. It just works for me.
Naturally, if you wanted multiple interrupt driven quadrature encoder support at 200Khz/channel you would not choose this chip. What would you use for that?

Something like multiple quadrature encoders at that rate, I'd start taking a serious look at CPLD's.. Or even FPGA's. But talk about added complexity. YEEEehaw!

[rdpzycho]

Price wide, the PICs did the best job.

depending on your location, PICs sometimes tend to be priced high and are not the best in high volume pricing. a more powerful AVR would cost around 1/4 the price of a PIC here though PICs and Z80s are more known here for hobbyists.

Philips ARM7 are priced at the fraction of some of the low power PICs yet is more powerful, a lot more powerful.

[FunnyNYPD]

Try to get some AVR and NXP sample before, never get one. Microchip is so convinent to get samples here in the USA.

Wondering how easily you can get AVR samples.

[pminmo]

My experience in low volume AVR's cost less than PIC's taking in account features, speed, I/O. My #1 beef with AVR's is the gap between 8 pin models and 18 pin models. Would love to see more choices around 14 pin units.

[kreutz]

Try to get some AVR and NXP sample before, never get one. Microchip is so convinent to get samples here in the USA.

Wondering how easily you can get AVR samples.

Maybe they don't count as samples, but I've got a few different chips when I bought the STK500 development system a couple of years ago, something they called AVR samples pack.

[pminmo]

I've gotted AVR samples a number of times, but you have to go through a Sales Rep and they hand deliver. So for a pure hobbiest that wants some to play with, probably not.

[rdpzycho]

Microchip no longer sends samples to my country, I think for around 3 to 5 years now. But you can get samples from Sales Rep.

I think TI's the best in sending away samples, caters even to hobbyists. Never received a non-working sample from TI. I received one chip from Dallas where I can not load the chip using parallel programming methods but the bootstrap loader, as well as the chip, is fine. Another one from Atmel (though from Sales Rep) where location 000Ch always contained FFh and can never be changed.

If the Sales Rep can not give samples there's always RS and Farnell here. Entry level NXP ARM7 is 1/4 to 1/3 the price of PIC16F877 considering the ARM7 can get on par with DSPs in some applications.

When you work for a research and development group and you are as well a hobbyist, you get the chance to have better samples.

Having friends in the industry may also give you good samples. Got two on NXP.

Overall, I think PIC get to be well known because of the number of development tools (DIY) available for hobbyists and the number of website. There are also these things for AVR (even a GNU C Compiler for AVR) but there are less websites (but there's AVRfreaks). SDCC works good for me for PIC (for all the hobby projects I do) but I rewrite some part of the Assembly Language then reassemble. I also write timing critical program in Assembly (except Switch statements, lazy to type so much sequence in assembly ) then non-critical parts on C with SDCC.

[frog]

Mikro lab or Mikroelectronica this is an awesome system they have C as well as basic compliers I believe up to so many lines, but for the hobby user it is more than enough, also there is the Pic-pro or Pic-basic these are also great they start at 100.00 dollars as a matter of fact I have a legal copy of Pic basic if you want it we can work something out I upgraded to Pro, however I recommend Mikroelectronica, they have development systems such as the Mikro Lab and you can plug up a 2 or 4 line display, I love Microchip products, but they do have limitations as was noted earlier, they do not cross platform as was stated about the other chips the instruction set does vary with their chips, but I love them they are so easy to use, also being concerned with instruction set is not as critical if you are not using ASM, if you are then it is an issue, you do need to have a basic understanding for debugging even if you are only using a C or Basic complier. I am not able to comment of Atmel I do not use them I do however believe that I have a programmer and development system somewhere, I will look if I do I will send it to you free.

Also note that the spelling for Mikroelectronica is correct it is a Russian company they have a vendor in the USA, his name I believe is Don, nice guy.

[rdpzycho]

I use CCS C Compiler for PIC (but I don't normally use their built in commands) on the company. For hobby I am using SDCC, though yes there are a lot of compilers that are good enough for hobby projects, just not complicated ones.

For instruction set, the AVR has a lot more instructions to learn than the PIC. Never yet did I do a program for AVR in ASM, just understand them. I used to write ASM programs for PIC until I came to know of all the good compilers where a lot of writing was compressed.

[Episs]

AVR is much faster than PIC16,18, here are some instructions in AVR that perform 2 operations like
movw r17:16,r1:r0
copy in one instruction 2 registers (moves 16bit data)
and assembly language is much simpler then PICs asm, because of multiple working registers (32) where you can store variables and perform between them operations, pic has only one Working registers and this is only bad thing that PIC architecture has, and it is really hard to code pic compared to AVR, I think that because of hard PiC asm language all PIC coders use C language for coding.
I started to learn coding with PICs and then tried out AVR and I found that AVR code looks 2x smaller compared to pic code becouse you don't have to preload working register with new value to make some operation and in this case one AVR instruction is2 PIC isntructions. so AVR performs 2x more operations compared to PIC in this particular case.
if we speak about price then LPC2101 beats all 8bit and 16bit microcontrollers like AVR,PICs.
So for motion controller I would choose LPC2101 + some CPLD of fpga, or just FPGA(as I already did some time ago).

[satanicoo]

Excuse me for stepping in on this matter, but myself am entering the world of "Microprocessor" programming, and according to what i have understood up until now, The title "Microchip vs Atmel" doesn't seem correct.

Microchip produces Microprocessors based on PIC "arquitecture", while Atmel makes them based on AVR, 8051 and ARM7 "arquitecture".

You are comparing PIC vs what from Atmel? AVR arquitecture?


Nowadays i have been trying to decide on what should i learn to program, on what "arquitecture" i should deploy my time, and start from there.

What "arquitecture" do you guys prefer?
8051?
AVR?
PIC?
ARM7?

Acording to this:
http://www.8052.com/forum/read.phtml?id=149579

ARM7 is the way to go, the new technologically advanced "arquitecture", the way of the future. What do you think?

PS: i typed "arquitecture" so many times it makes my eyes cry.

[Horsedorf]

Dude, "architecture."

As for which to learn, wellllll.. it entirely depends on what you want to do, what your requirements are and how you prioritize them.

For the PIC, there are a LOT of free tools, and many free language implementations to choose from. The hardware is relatively inexpensive and the devices tend to be robust and easy to work with.

Is the architecture of the processor important to you? in other words, how easy it is to understand.. then the PIC might not be the best, as there are certain issues, especially if you program in assembly language, that you have to be aware of such as not trying to create a jump table that crosses a page boundary. Many a brave soul has been fornicated upon a mightily by that little gotcha. The limitation of working registers is also a bit of a pain (And i REALLY REALLY hate how they try to pass off a little sliding memory window as a 'robust register set')

The Motorola (freescale now) processors are good to work with, like the 68hc11, but they are costly to work with.

The luminary microprocessors use the Mortex M3 core which is a sub set of the arm7.. (9?) core and is optimized for the embedded universe, and motor control in particular. The ST micro's, (ST32's) are also pretty nice for three phase motor control.

So choosing one really depends on.. you. My only *REAL* advice on this, is.. don't fall into a "religion". In other words.. don't get to thinking that one particular CPU is the end all do all super cpu that is better than anything else. They all have their pro's and con's, just like our elected officials.

Horsedorf