Consider also that flash is little or no advantage for many applications (such
as low-end mass produced trackballs and mice), so those applications aren't
going to rush away from otp & mask rom parts even if flash could be had for
the same price. But for the many applications that do benefit from flash,
microchip may be forced to become more competitive, either by dropping
prices or increasing features. I'm sure they are already feeling some
competitive pressure coming from parts that have performance and features
that PIC's still lack.  The fast Scenix chips and the chips with built-in USB
from Philips and others come to mind.

I really hope mchip can turn their USB parts in production soon, and more
importantly, get USB functionality into flash parts with better than 8 bit a/d.
Their upcoming 16C7xx USB parts that are mentioned on their web site are
cool, but a 16F8xx part with USB would be a better bet.  After all, USB is
primarily for PC peripherals, and the ability to reprogram such peripherals
in the field is an extremely desirable feature.  Of course, flash won't mean
much for these applications unless there is some mechanism to flash them
over the USB connection itself. Maybe have both OTP and flash on the
same part so that code in the OTP can handle re-writing the flash from data
sent over USB. Or maybe something like two microcontrollers on a single
chip, one bare-bones one with OTP just to handle communications and flash
upgrading and a more feature-rich flashable one that is free to do other
things with minimal communications overhead. Major design cost I'm sure.
But I can dream can't I? And if Microchip could produce such a thing at a
reasonable cost, I don't think they'd have any shortage of customers for it.
And isn't this kind of co-processor function just the kind of thing that PICs
were created for in the first place?

 > Microchip's success has more to do with savvy marketing, a willingness
 > to deal with customers of any size, and the ability to actually deliver
 > parts most of the time than with price. Don't write them off just yet.

---
                                        Peace,
                                        William Kitchen
                                        bill@iglobal.net

The future is ours to create.