AVR itself is a nice family: low cost and high performance.

1) To hobbyists or small shops: 
AVR is very nice with free GCC and 	cheap tools.
The only drawback is that the sampling program
is not as good as Microchip. Anyway, still manageable.

2) To large customers: 
AVR is as well okay if the annual quantity is in millions per 
year! Atmel will be very happy to help you. Still product 
obsoletes too fast. Anyway, still manageable (?).

3) Those in the middle: 
If you are using AVRs in production run of 1000s or 10ks, 
stay away from AVR. Atmel will from time to time give you
problems! This can not be fixed!

Our Germany counterparts developed great sensors (optic sensors
and ultrasonic sensors) with AVRs despite all the reported
problems with AVR chips. As a matter of fact, the maths library
in AVR-GCC is originally developed by a guy working for P+F. 
The new batches of AtTiny and AtMega parts are also much better 
than the AT90s as well.

However even though they can fixed all kinds of problems,
they can not fixed the bad behavior of Atmel. They have
delivery problems now. The corporate component manager has
to issue a warning not to use AVR in any new design!

Regards,
Xiaofan

-----Original Message-----
From: John Samperi 
Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2005 4:16 AM

Use a PIC? NAH....don't listen to the man, well not at least
one of classic ones with 2K program space paging and a few
bytes of ram scattered all over the place :-D

Regards

John Samperi
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