> I'm a little surprised I haven't seen anyone else post this. About a week > ago this was announced, but I recall hearing talk of this more than 5 years > ago... > > http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/business/dealbook/microchip-technology-to-buy-atmel-for-nearly-3-6-billion.html?_r=0 > > <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/business/dealbook/microchip-technology-to-buy-atmel-for-nearly-3-6-billion.html?_r=0> Actually, it's the first I'd heard about it. I had started with the Microchip PIC line of microcontrollers, but grew dissatisfied with Microchip's attitude. They only supported MS-DOS with their tools, their programmer protocol was proprietary and undocumented, and they were really cagey about answering technical questions. Their flash chips were also expensive, so I'd develop on the UV-erase ones and deploy with the OTP versions. I went ahead with a third-party programmer, but the newer PIC chips had a different programming algorithm, and the firmware update for the programmer to support those chips removed support for the documented serial protocol. Another annoyance was that the C compiler was expensive, so I had to do all my programming in assembler.
I did a lot of research and looked at many architectures before settling on the Atmel AVR line, with their strong flash support (Atmel was a big flash memory manufacturer), their $79 demo board that also served as an in-circuit programmer (open source, with a documented protocol, too), widely available tool set, and gcc support so I could program in C. Over the years, Microchip slowly learned how the market works, and eventually did document their programmer protocol, and even made a hamhanded attempt to offer their tools for modern operating systems, but they still had the horrid UI typical of MS-DOS software, and were horrible bloatware. The Arduino people also settled on the AVR architecture for their initial rollout, giving away a complete portable tool chain, affordable boards with bootloaders, and offering an environment where you didn't have to worry about details like fuse settings, bringing huge numbers of people into the AVR fold. I'm a little dubious about Microchip taking over, and it would be a shame if they attempted to shut down the AVR line, programmers, tools, and support. Fortunately by now, the Arduino movement has branched out, and supports a wide variety of other CPU architectures (ARM, MSP430, LXP, the pointless Intel efforts, and many others), so even if Microchip kills off that cash cow, I'll have my pick of architectures to move to (these days, you can get a serious ARM CPU in DIP format, useful for breadboarding). However, I hope they leave well enough alone. - John -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/A5D7F3F9-5DA7-4CF9-BB80-10B8B897B3AC%40mac.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
