On 9/12/07, Jesse Lackey wrote: > Go to AVR, do not look back. I finally did. An undocumented bug in > usart hardware that made code fully working on two chips fail weirdly > was the last straw. Fortunately since I knew the code was fine I only > lost a day and a half - had I been doing the original development with > this chip, it would have been a week gone. Microchip is run by the > marketing/sales dept. not engineering. I've been pretty impressed by > AVR studio + winavr (GCC port) though it has only been 3 projects so > far. Really - leave mchip behind. > That is certainly not a good advice for the application -- an industrial application. Atmel AVR is not known to last long but PIC is. On the other hand, Atmel 8051 seems to be better. For hobbyist or very low quantity or very large quantity, AVRs might be ok with good support from Atmel. For medium size industrial customers, Atmel is a bad choice, at least from my experience. They obsolete their first generation AVR90S after only 4 years in the market. Recently they just obsolete the another 5V EEprom and recommend a 3.3V EEprom for "replacement". Very good, I just changed the design to use a Microchip EEprom. AVR is a good choice for hobbyists due to good support from simple programmers and AVR-gcc. And Atmel chips have bugs as well. Bugs are inevitable. Regards, Xiaofan -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist