Brendan Moran wrote:

>>There is no internal oscillator in the PIC 16F84A. That's one of the
>
> reasons
>
>>why it's fast becoming obsolete.
>>
>
>
> Hey... the PIC16F87x doesn't have an internal oscillator, and I don't hear
> people saying that it's going obsolete...

Well, I'll go ahead and say it!

It's just a matter of time until all the "large" 16F PICs are obsolete;
the 18F parts are going to displace them. Heck - RIGHT NOW at Digi-Key,
an 18F442 is cheaper than a 16F877! I compared an 18F442 rather than an
18F452 because it has the same amount of flash memory as a 16F877. To be
fair, a 16F877A, a new updated version of the 877 (adding comparators,
which are off by default. Almost completely compatible; there are
changes to writing flash memory in a program) that has just started to
show up at distributors, is slightly cheaper than either of those parts.

Right now, of course, there is the little matter of finding a way to
program an 18F. Most programmers don't know how to deal with them yet.
And you have to rewrite your 16F code a bit.

Back to the original question... it's not quite such a big deal that the
16F877 doesn't have an internal oscillator, because it already has
plenty of I/O pins - 32, to be precise. Adding two more would only be
about a 3% increase. But a 16F628 has 16 I/O pins (if you use the
internal R/C oscillator and disable MCLR); an improvement of more than
20% over the 13 pins available on a 16F84.

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