On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 1:48 PM, William "Chops" Westfield 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. =A0ARM (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. Cortex M3 and ARM7TDMI are more geared toward MCUs. Many ARM9s do not have built-in Flash. Some other ARM9s which are more geared toward MCus do not offer really much more than the next generation Cortex M3s (100MHz). ColdFire is not bad. But the MCU like ColdFire V1/V2 offerings are a bit limited compared to the competitors, especially V1. C2000 is probably in a different market (motor control or things like that) and the competitor is more like dsPIC, ADI BlackFin and Infineon C166/XE166 or similar DSCs (digital signal controllers). > Of course, your overall systems cost can go up even while the main > chip stays cheap. =A0A lot of those are going to need multiple power > supplies, 4-layer boards, external drivers for even minimal external > devices, etc. =A0PICs are going to stay competitive at the low end for a > long time. =A0At the higher end, you really have to start thinking about > things other than faster/bigger PICs. PIC24 and PIC32 can be competitive as well. Microchip will have to come out with many lower price yet feature-rich parts to be competitive in the 16/32bit MCU market, especially to capture sockets from existing ARM MCU customers. IMHO, most of the PIC18F (non PIC18J and PIC18K) are really not cost effective right now for volume application. The new enhanced mid-range PIC19xx are really not that cost competitive either. -- = Xiaofan http://mcuee.blogspot.com -- = http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist