Maybe MSP430 and Silicon Labs C8051F are good alternatives to 
AVRs. C8051F is really fast. Keil C51 is one of the best
embed C compilers. The free SDCC is also usable for 8051.
Right now we are testing the EMC of C8051F30x and seems it
is not as good as PICs (latch up problem) but this may
be due to the small board size. Another product with
bigger board size (bigger ground) has no problems with EMC
with the same C8051F part.

I am not so sure about MSP430. It is said the EMC performance
was quite bad last time. The architecture is very nice.
MSP-GCC is also free and open source.

Regards,
Xiaofan

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Rigby-Jones 
Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2005 4:40 PM
To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public.
Subject: RE: [AVR] Brown out problems

>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

Not used those kind of PIC in years (not at work anyway).  I do 
love the speed of the AVR though, we have been limited to 8MHz with 
the 18F parts we have been using (at 3.3v) and the Atmel is running 
at the same clock rate, so it's significantly quicker.  I've been 
able to write "nice" C code without worrying that the overhead of 
abstraction layers etc. is going to bite me.  The GCC compiler needs 
some fairly basic optimisation improvements though (e.g. setting a 
single bit within a long takes a vast (~15 IIRC) number of 
instructions, should be a single bit set).

Regards

Mike
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