Technically AVR may have its advantages but that is not the deciding fact. If you are talking about "killer app" that AVR can do and PIC can not, I think ARM may be even better there and beat AVR. However people use small AVR and PIC will not need ARMs because of cost and current consumptions and other reasons. IMHO, there are two strong disadvantages for the AVR family. 1) Discontinue their product too fast. When Flash was very popular earlier, they rushed to produce Flash memory instead of MCUs and their delivery of MCUs became very bad. Then they starts to discontinue basically all their old devices. This is not a problem for hobbyists but a big big problem for corporate customers. 2) It is said that the EMC performance is bad. I myself do not know whether this is true or not but our Germany counterparts always use an external reset IC. What I see is that the analog feature is much weaker than PICs. The slow ADC and lack of variable voltage reference for the comparator are two examples. That being said, Microchip has lost their price advantages to AVR at least in Europe. Our Germany counterparts are now pushing us to use AVR (mega48, tiny2313, tiny26 etc with QFN32 packaging) because of the cost and space constraint we are facing. In a word, one needs to choose the MCUs based on their specific needs. Both PICs and AVRs are quite good. Xiaofan >Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 16:40:55 -0500 >From: "Roy J. Gromlich" > >Agreed - I have become rather used to the PIC, and have a lot >of hardware and time invested in working with it, so climbing=20 >the learning curve on the AVRs hasn't been really worth it to=20 >me -- so far. I suppose that could change is there were to be >a "killer app" that would only work on AVRs. > >Roy J. Gromlich > _______________________________________________ http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist