I always find this an interesting discussion.

In my consulting business I basically use 3 microcontroller families
for most of my small single chip applications: PIC, AVR and MSP430. 

Which one I choose is usually application driven: 

PICs for most 5V applications where power consumption is not a major
concern. Microchip has a PIC with the exact mix of peripherals that
match almost every application, one of the nice benefits of such a huge
product line. 

AVR for some general purpose applications where the peripheral choice
isn't real critical. Generally speedy operation and a great architecture.

MSP430 for battery and low powered applications where power consumption 
is critical. Nothing touches the MSP430 for low power in the PIC or AVR
line (although they are getting closer). MSP430 also has the best
analog peripherals (12 bit ADCs and DACs that really are) of any micro 
family except maybe the Silicon Labs (Cygnal) parts. 

The MSP430 family is starting be a general purpose favorite of mine. TI
are introducing new parts with higher clock rate and their peripheral
modules are incredibly flexible, if not a bit complicated to understand
at first. They also don't suffer from near the errata that seems to
plague all new PIC chips these past few years. It appears sometimes
that Microchip is taking the Microsoft approach to silicon design and
requiring the users to be unpaid beta testers for new chip designs.
Sometimes it takes more than a year for Microchip to correct errata on
a give chip, I know of a PSP bug that I discovered in the 16C6x family
and it took close to 2 years before they finally fixed it even though
they went through at least two die shrinks over the same time period.
Very frustrating. 

Atmel is second on my list of least trustworthy silicon suppliers 
(behind Maxim) due to their tendency to chase whatever market is hot at 
the moment. Someone also mentioned this in another post. I made a good 
living for about 18 months converting AVR apps to PIC when they decided 
to shut down AVR production in deference to Flash memory. They haven't 
added significant fab capacity since then, so I don't think it's out of 
the realm of possibility it could happen again. But for smaller volume
projects where I can get all the parts I need "off-the-shelf", I think
they're great.

I have tools (C compiler/IDE/In-circuit Debugger/Programmer) for each
family mentioned (as well as several other chip families) so I feel
free to use whatever fits the application.

One thing I'm always amazed at is how many people (even hobbyists) who
STILL use the "churn 'n burn" method for debugging their firmware. I
can understand this back in the days when hardware debugging required
an expensive in-circuit emulator but those days are long gone. Every
decent microcontroller family these days has in-circuit programming and
debugging and usually a free or low cost tool chain to support it. If a
micro doesn't have ISP and on-chip debugging I won't even consider it.
I wouldn't consider it even if I was doing it as a hobby, especially
when you can get an ICD2 (or equivalent) for the PICs or MSP430 FET pod
so inexpensively.
 
Matt Pobursky
Maximum Performance Systems

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