On Wed, 30 Aug 2006 20:26:27 -0400, you wrote:

>I need to get an MCU with the following features.
>
>1) smaller than 5x5mm QFN
>2) 12 I/O or more
>3) 1 USART
>4) 1 SPI to interface an external 16bit DAC
>5) with 128B EEPROM or more
>6) 8-bit PWM or better
>7) low current consumption with on-board caliberated oscillator
>8) 8kB or 16kB flash, 256B SRAM
>10) cheaper than US$3 at 1k quantity
>
>Right now I am thinking of Atmel Mega88/168 AVR. I want to choose
>from PIC18F, MSP430 and AVR or something similar with good C
>compiler support.
>

I've been using the ATMega88 a lot recently - excellent value for money, but AVR Studio is
significantly more sluggish, buggy & flaky than MPLAB so figure some extra development time to cover
this. The Debugwire facility provides near-ICE debugging using just the reset pin, when it works.
Atmel are about to release "AVR Dragon" which is a very cheap debug platform for debugwire & JTAG
debugging (currently need to use JTAG-ICE MK.II which is a little pricy). Time will tell if
integrating this into AVR Studio makes it more or less useable...! 
IAR have their own dev environment, which I think supports JTAG-ICE, so if time is more important to
you than tool cost, this may be a better way to go.

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