$1.00 for a 68HC11 ?
this has got to be a sick joke,

last time I asked 68HC11A was $28.00 NZ from Arrow (wholesale
distributor), other parts were not in stock. years ago I actually made a
IDE X-assembler/editor/downloader with running home built interface on
an Astrad 664 PC, it all worked, but finally I woke up to the fact that
the 68HC11 series were just not cost effective.

Motorola have a history of indoctrinating students into the Motorola way
by giving special deals to Universities, they sure catch up on price
afterwards. Sounds like you've been the victim of a strong Motorola
sales pitch.

Stocks are also important, to the best of my knoledge Microchip so far
has a better history of "just in time delivery" + reserve stocks, look
on Motorola's web site and there are sometimes messages about big
delays, this has been a big problem for Motorola recently. Imagine
completing a major design and finding out that no parts will be
available for X months.

The 68HC11 series does have a nice pheripheral range and instruction
set(slow), but so do the Atmel Mega, SGS Thomson ST92F103 and Hitachi
H8S, they also feature 128k Flash program memory, EEPROM, Analog,
SCI/s,SPI, high speed etc and have the benefit of deliverability.

Take a close look at most of the Microchip series and you will find a
large number of pin for pin compatible Micros with widely variable
pheripheral options, Motorola has a list of Micros to be phased out and
some of the 68HC11 series are on there.

Emulator ? either you have the money or you get to use your brain, it's
not a big deal unless you have a poor understanding of the chip and
don't read the manual and are pressed for time.

4 microcontrolers in a consumer product ? *really* necessary ? surely
you don't need 4 of exactly the same micro in one product, sounds pretty
unusual.

regards,
Graham Daniel.

Ry Lato wrote:
>
> I have been working on project for about 2 years using the PIC family of
> microcontrollers. I now am starting to regret ever using PICs. It seems
> that a 68HC11 will do almost everything a PIC can with many advantages
> over a PIC. For one thing, I could have done debugging without an
> expensive emulator. An eval board with buffalo monitor would have
> worked. In volume the PIC16C74 costs about $5 in volumes of 100 from
> digikey. The HC11 can be bought for about $1 these days. The HC11 also
> has on-board flash. A savings of another $1. When you have 4
> microcontrollers in a consumer product, those savings can be
> significant. I also would not have had to deal with tedious an
> meticulous chore of  bank switching, whether in program code or ram
> pages My question, is why are people choosing the PIC family of
> microcontrollers over the HC11, especially the PIC16C74? Perhaps I am
> missing something.
>
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