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Nice summary of Atmel. I had no idea that Atmel was not doing well. Atmel has the basic arduino business, although a lot of other architectures, especially ne

Nice summary of Atmel. I had no idea that Atmel was not doing well. Atmel has the basic arduino business, although a lot of other architectures, especially newer and more powerful ones, are using the arduino framework for their CPUs. Even the newest official arduino platform is ARM based. I'm constantly reading about how the 8-bit market is still doing well, despite the emergence of ARM. Even though the AVR hasn't really innovated much, it has picked up a lot of peripherals and low power modes which has kept the AVRs from being strictly in the bargain basement MCU market. I don't think there has been much innovation in the 8-bit market, but the AVRs have a really good programming model, especially compared to the 8-bit PICs. I don't know if that's enough to give AVRs a shot at new designs, but they're one of the best 8-bit options today, IMHO.

flyinglizard 11y ago
Arduino has been huge for Atmel in terms of brand recognition and popularity of AVRs, but overall, its not a huge revenue source (even if 1m Arduino boards are sold yearly, that's at best $3m-$4m in sales). Of course that there are indirect benefits. Most of the designs I know, migrate away from 8 bits and into 32 bit. The Cortex M0 is great. While designing with 8 bit is somewhat of an upgrade dead-end, if you design a product with an ST Cortex-M0, you can pretty easily go up their Cortex family ladder while retaining a lot of compatibility on both the board and firmware levels (ST is particularly good at that, which is why its my default recommendation when designing a new product - I can explain why if anyone is interested). The denser 8 bit parts are really expensive anyway - I suspect its because manufacturers know its mostly "locked in" customers that need more flash or I/O for an existing design and need a more capable, near drop-in replacement. I also vastly prefer AVRs to PICs, but AVRs were kinda where I started my embedded programming career so I guess I just reflect on them fondly.
- paulmd 11y ago
  Please do. I can easily see the benefits of being able to upgrade a chip while retaining software/hardware compatibility but I'd love to hear any other selling points. Are they reasonably competitive with equivalent AVRs in terms of cost and power? Do they have a PicoPower equivalent?
  - flyinglizard 11y ago
    PicoPower - I can't tell you the specifics, as comparing power consumption is a bit difficult (you need to figure out which peripherals you need running, whats the system clock, input voltage, sleep/wakeup regime etc and calculate from there), but they do have STM32L0 series of ultra-low power based on Cortex-M0+. As to why do I like ST: 1. They are very easy to design boards for. Each IO pin on the Cortex micros maps to up to 16 different internal functions. That gives amazing flexibility from the board design perspective. 2. They have fantastic long term migration paths. You can directly go from Cortex-M3 to Cortex-M4 to Cortex-M7, while, in many cases, retaining package compatibility. 3. They have very good design validation. Their errata sheets are quite shorter than what I remember working with other manufacturers. 4. They have a huge amount of useful IO, such as timers (I have one design using over 15 timer channels) and a quite flexible and powerful ADC architecture. 5. They probably have the widest selection of Cortex microcontrollers in the industry. There are downsides, too; I generally find their peripherals less advanced than Atmel's (regular CAN instead of CAN-FD, USB inferior to Atmel's, I2C that's really sucky and prone to errors, slower clock and no dual precision FPU on the new F7 family). There was also some story with ST's 2MB flash parts, being not really usable - but I'm not sure what was that about. Overall you can't go wrong with ST. The long term migration ability and board design flexibility are well worth the downsides. Coming from an AVR, you're immediately going to get way more memory, much higher clock frequencies, ARM CMSIS libraries (fun if you have any math/DSP going on) and more industry standard tools.
    - petra 11y ago
      >> I2C that's really sucky and prone to errors Is that fixable via software? if not , is it worth the risk ?
      - flyinglizard 11y ago
        Yes, you can bitbang your way out of that, but its not great for all applications (like when you want to do DMA to/from the I2C in the background while the processor sleeps or does something else; can't do that with GPIO bitbang). I was really surprised by that when I first encountered it; I2C is something rudimentary.

flyinglizard 11y ago

Arduino has been huge for Atmel in terms of brand recognition and popularity of AVRs, but overall, its not a huge revenue source (even if 1m Arduino boards are sold yearly, that's at best $3m-$4m in sales). Of course that there are indirect benefits. Most of the designs I know, migrate away from 8 bits and into 32 bit. The Cortex M0 is great. While designing with 8 bit is somewhat of an upgrade dead-end, if you design a product with an ST Cortex-M0, you can pretty easily go up their Cortex family ladder while retaining a lot of compatibility on both the board and firmware levels (ST is particularly good at that, which is why its my default recommendation when designing a new product - I can explain why if anyone is interested). The denser 8 bit parts are really expensive anyway - I suspect its because manufacturers know its mostly "locked in" customers that need more flash or I/O for an existing design and need a more capable, near drop-in replacement. I also vastly prefer AVRs to PICs, but AVRs were kinda where I started my embedded programming career so I guess I just reflect on them fondly.

paulmd 11y ago
Please do. I can easily see the benefits of being able to upgrade a chip while retaining software/hardware compatibility but I'd love to hear any other selling points. Are they reasonably competitive with equivalent AVRs in terms of cost and power? Do they have a PicoPower equivalent?
- flyinglizard 11y ago
  PicoPower - I can't tell you the specifics, as comparing power consumption is a bit difficult (you need to figure out which peripherals you need running, whats the system clock, input voltage, sleep/wakeup regime etc and calculate from there), but they do have STM32L0 series of ultra-low power based on Cortex-M0+. As to why do I like ST: 1. They are very easy to design boards for. Each IO pin on the Cortex micros maps to up to 16 different internal functions. That gives amazing flexibility from the board design perspective. 2. They have fantastic long term migration paths. You can directly go from Cortex-M3 to Cortex-M4 to Cortex-M7, while, in many cases, retaining package compatibility. 3. They have very good design validation. Their errata sheets are quite shorter than what I remember working with other manufacturers. 4. They have a huge amount of useful IO, such as timers (I have one design using over 15 timer channels) and a quite flexible and powerful ADC architecture. 5. They probably have the widest selection of Cortex microcontrollers in the industry. There are downsides, too; I generally find their peripherals less advanced than Atmel's (regular CAN instead of CAN-FD, USB inferior to Atmel's, I2C that's really sucky and prone to errors, slower clock and no dual precision FPU on the new F7 family). There was also some story with ST's 2MB flash parts, being not really usable - but I'm not sure what was that about. Overall you can't go wrong with ST. The long term migration ability and board design flexibility are well worth the downsides. Coming from an AVR, you're immediately going to get way more memory, much higher clock frequencies, ARM CMSIS libraries (fun if you have any math/DSP going on) and more industry standard tools.
  - petra 11y ago
    >> I2C that's really sucky and prone to errors Is that fixable via software? if not , is it worth the risk ?
    - flyinglizard 11y ago
      Yes, you can bitbang your way out of that, but its not great for all applications (like when you want to do DMA to/from the I2C in the background while the processor sleeps or does something else; can't do that with GPIO bitbang). I was really surprised by that when I first encountered it; I2C is something rudimentary.