On Sat, Aug 24, 2002 at 10:38:31AM +0200, Jan Malina wrote:
> Been looking at pics mostly for microcontroler work, but i stumbled accros
> the atmel ones, and i wonder, what are the strong/weak points of them
> compared to the PIC microcontrolers? as they do seem cheaper...

I'll take a crack:

AVR Pros
--------
* Cost effective
* No paging/banking issues
* Flash based w/ simple programming hardware
* Industry standard Intel 8051 ISA
* Reasonable program memory, I/O, and RAm resources
* Truly free unlimited use/resources C compiler

AVR Cons
--------
* Perception of lack of availabilty. It was a reality in the past so it had
  a kernel of truth. Probably scared off a lot of developers permanently.

PIC Pros
--------
* Cost effective. Mchip has an amazing way of adding more but reducing cost.
* Flash/EPROM based w/ simple programming hardware
* Industry standard PIC ISA
* Reasonable program memory, I/O, and RAM resouces
* Fast execution of one instruction per cycle
* True RISC ISA w/ only 35 instructions for the 16F midrange family
* Once in production very high availability and longevity
* Industry standard free development environment: MPLAB
* Access to one of the greatest PIC resources, the PICLIST ;-)

PIC Cons
--------
* The funky architecture: banking
* The funky architecture: paging
* The funky architecture: RMW instructions on I/O ports
* The funky architecture

You really can't lose. It just that you'll have a different set of
resources to use if you pick one over the other. Personally I picked the
PIC and stuck to it simply because there'd be a heavy cost to switching and
there's nothing in the cost profile that's significant enough to warrant a
change.

Good Luck.

BAJ

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