On Sep 11, 2009, at 2:04 AM, Xiaofan Chen wrote:

> If you switch to various ARM vendors, you will probably save some  
> money. At 10K quantity, many Cortex M3 MCus are below US$2.50.   
> Those with USB, CAN and Ethernet (beats any current PIC32) are more  
> like around US$4 or less.

It turns out that there are quite a few 32bit CPUs with impressive  
peripheral sets that are under than $4 price point.  ARM (lots of  
ARMS, and not just M3s and ARM7s; see TI's OMAP-13x ARM9 cpus),  
Freescale Coldfire, and TI's C2000 (DSP-like), are ones I've come  
across recently.

Of course, your overall systems cost can go up even while the main  
chip stays cheap.  A lot of those are going to need multiple power  
supplies, 4-layer boards, external drivers for even minimal external  
devices, etc.  PICs are going to stay competitive at the low end for a  
long time.  At the higher end, you really have to start thinking about  
things other than faster/bigger PICs.

BillW

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