>
>>> IMHO, there are two strong disadvantages for the AVR family.
>>>
>>I'd feel warmer and fuzzier if Atmel were making money, too, instead
>>of leaking red ink all over...
>>
>>Microchip and Freescale are credible "single source" manufacturers; I'm
>>not so sure about atmel.  Sigh.

I must agree that I'd be more nervous about designing in Atmel than Microchip - Microchip have a
proven track record of good availability  - they now even have a  'fab to order' test cell for rush
orders. They also don't obsolete parts, even when differences are tiny. 

>>And when Atmel obsoletes a product they replace it with one that will 
>>fit in the same hole but has more bells and whistles for less money, 
>>from my experience.

But they also have a habit of introducing subtle changes that can take days to find & fix The newer
parts are rarely completely binary compatible - an important issue for product maintainance in a
market where the original programmer may have moved on.....

I had a cracker of a problem when upgrading to the Mega8515 recently....
The product started off on a 90S4414. When that was obsoleted we changed to the 90S8515 - no
problem. 
However when _that_ one was obsoleted, we started seeing what apeared to be random eeprom failures
in the field.

We eventually found the problem - the 4414 has 256 bytes eeprom, so it has no EEADRH register, and
therefore no code to initialise it. The 8515 has 512 bytes, but EEADRH is initialised to 0 on reset,
so no problem- no code change needed.  However on the Mega8515, this register is not initialised and
powers up in a random state. This was not highlighted in the 'differences' section of the datasheet.
Other people have had problems with significantly longer eeprom write times on the mega replacement
parts.

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