All, My 2 cents worth. I believe that not only will Microchip take a leadership position in 16 bit micros too, it will do that in only 8 years and not the 12 it took to gain the 8 bit leadership position. My reasoning is in 1990, when Microchip was beginning to make their comeback, there was virtually no market visibility or penetration. However, now that they are the 8 bit leaders in the industry, their market visibility and penetration is rather broad and deep respectfully. And in my opinion, they have excellent products, excellent tools, and excellent support. Their products are relatively inexpensive and reasonably easy to get (at least in the US). Their development tools are a little pricey, but when compared to other manufacturers products and tools, they are still reasonably priced. With all of that said, it stands to reason to me that with the introduction of the 24 series parts, that their ability to get devices into the marketplace by the integration of these devices in higher performance embedded systems will be much easier. And I believe that the users of Microchips current product lineup will be some of the first to utilize the newer chips because of performance gains in some applications. There are currently applications out there that use the 8 bit parts and that's enough horsepower for the job. However, there are also some applications out there that could use a slight boost in performance, and the 16 bit parts will facilitate this performance increase. Likewise, there are applications where no microchip part heretofore has had the performance and/or resources to make it practical. With the 16 bit parts, that situation has changed, so now those applications can be realized. And further still, new users will come on board because of the release of the 16 bit parts. And if the future leadership of Microchip's management team continues as it has for the last 16 years or so, and given the reasoning stated above, I see no compelling reason why Microchip's taking over the 16 bit market couldn't be realized. And, considering their experience so far in growing something from virtually nothing, they should be able to do it in record time. Hence, my prediction that it will be done in 8 years or less versus the 12 years to take over the 8 bit market. So, by 2014, Microchip should be first in the 16 bit market, and will probably retain first place in the 8 bit market. I guess time will tell. Sorry for the long winded talk, but I just wanted to give my opinion, for whatever it's worth. I'm done now, so back to the regular programming. Does anyone agree? Disagree? Just checking. Regards, Jim > On 5/17/06, Charles Craft wrote: >> Guess these numbers are in the SEC docs they release but I never get >> around to reading those. >> >> Interesting stats. >> >> http://biz.yahoo.com/ibd/060516/general01.html?.v=1 >> > > Meanwhile, Microchip Technology is gaining share in the market for > higher-priced 16-bit microcontrollers. > > The company entered the 16-bit market two years ago. Its sales in the > sector rose 52% last quarter, though from a small base. It doesn't > break out total 16-bit sales. > > Sanghi vows to become No. 1 in 16 bits, though he admits "it's going to > take a while." > > "It took 12 years to become No. 1 (in 8 bits)," he said. > > > > This will be more interesting to watch. I will say Microchip will > continue to dominate in the 8-bit market. But I am not so sure about > whether 16-bit PIC24/dsPIC30/dsPIC33 will dominate the market or not > given the >strong competition from incumbent players (Infineon, Freescale, Renesas, >Fujitsu, TI, ...) and new ARM based low cost 32-bit players (Philips, >Atmel, TI, ...) > > Regards, > Xiaofan > > -- > http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive > View/change your membership options at > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist