Matt, Thanks a lot! Your reply is very interesting and well written. 

MSP430 is an interesting family and seems to catch up also. The problem
is always the pricing for us. It also seems to me that TI is basically
an Analog and DSP company and not so much an MCU vendor. We used their
TMS370 long ago and they are rare now.

Silicon Labs (Cygnal) parts are interesting too even though they are
not that big. So we have to wait and see.

Freescale is another reliable source but it seems now their lead
time is very long as well. It seems to me that Microchip and 
Freescale are doing very well or too well.

Very interesting comments from Bill as well. Thanks.

Xiaofan


>Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 16:10:12 -0600
>From: Matt Pobursky <piclist@mps-design.com>
>
>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

>Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2004 03:48:02 -0800
>From: William "Chops" Westfield <westfw@mac.com>
>...
>In some ways, it seems like a major benefit of the AVRs has been that
>they've motivated microchip to make improvements along lines that they
>might otherwise have neglected.
>
>BillW
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