On Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:17:04 -0700, Vitaliy wrote:
> John Day wrote:
>>> Regarding the Arduino phenomenon, what kind of volumes are we talking
>>> about? Tens of thousands?
>>>
>>
>> Yes, and that's per year for several suppliers.
>>
> Compared to billions of PICs. I think that "Microchip is losing ground
> fast to chip families that have well supported open source and free
> compiler options" is a gross exaggeration.
>
> Things may have changed recently, but I remember Microchip folks boasting
> that every year they are capturing a greater and greater market share
> from Motorola and others.

I was going to respond in kind. I seem to recall reading at the beginning
of the year that in the 8 bit world (which is hugely the large volume spot
on the low end) that Microchip was way way way out in front of whoever was
in 2nd place. The other big volume seller in the microcontroller world was
the ARM7/9/Cortex-M3 end of the spectrum which also shipped in the billions
last year.

That jives pretty well with where all my design activity has been the past
two years -- PICs for the low end 8 bit stuff, MSP430s for the really low
power stuff and ARMs of various flavors for anything above a mid-range PIC.
Interestingly, this past year was a good year for me with PIC designs. I
have a new customer in the agriculture business that will use about 75-100K
PICs this year. They never used PICs before I took over doing their design
work so that's a nice (fly speck!) gain for Microchip...

Matt Pobursky
Maximum Performance Systems

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