Matt,

very interesting and well written. How is the pricing on the MSP series=20
compared to the others? What development environment do you recommend=20
for the MSP? =20

/Ake

Matt Pobursky wrote:

>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.=20
>
>Which one I choose is usually application driven:=20
>
>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.=20
>
>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=20
>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=20
>family except maybe the Silicon Labs (Cygnal) parts.=20
>
>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.=20
>
>Atmel is second on my list of least trustworthy silicon suppliers=20
>(behind Maxim) due to their tendency to chase whatever market is hot at=20
>the moment. Someone also mentioned this in another post. I made a good=20
>living for about 18 months converting AVR apps to PIC when they decided=20
>to shut down AVR production in deference to Flash memory. They haven't=20
>added significant fab capacity since then, so I don't think it's out of=20
>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.
>=20
>Matt Pobursky
>Maximum Performance Systems
>
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>http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
>View/change your membership options at
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>
>
> =20
>


--=20
 ---
Ake Hedman (YAP - Yet Another Programmer)
eurosource, Brattbergav=E4gen 17, 820 50 LOS, Sweden
Phone: (46) 657 413430 Cellular: (46) 73 84 84 102
Company home: http://www.eurosource.se     =20
Kryddor/Te/Kaffe: http://www.brattberg.com
Personal homepage: http://www.eurosource.se/akhe
Automated home: http://www.vscp.org


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