[time-nuts] favorite microcontroller module?
Chuck Harris
cfharris at erols.com
Wed Feb 20 11:53:23 EST 2008
Bob Paddock wrote:
>
> The PIC gained a foothold due to Motorola, not Hobbyists.
> At the time most embedded designs were moving to the 6805 family
> for the low end (small pin count) chips. Then Motorola said
> "Sorry guys. Detroit bought *all of them* for the foreseeable
> future." The PIC was the only real option at the time, outside
> of the Zilog Z8; 8048 & 8051 had not yet moved to small
> pin counts. If it was not for that move by Motorola the
> world would be a very different place today.
I doubt it, the audience of these two devices is quite different.
The 6805 family could address 64K external RAM/ROM/IO. The PIC
has no such capability. The original PIC's had 64-128 words
of program ROM on board, and something like 32 bytes of RAM.
They could not address external RAM, ROM, or IO devices.
> I have an original PIC data book from General Instruments here,
> and if you read that today, you'd wonder why anyone would
> want to design in this part intended to run a Washing Machine.
Because they have a "Washing Machine" sized job?
There are thousands of tasks that are marginally too big for a PAL,
and too small for a general purpose microprocessor. The PIC is for
those jobs.
> The PIC18, other than the RAM bank switching, is not that bad.
True.
> Don't write off the dsPIC/PIC24, those are good parts, more like
> the 68000. Also the PIC32 is based on MISP, so even Microchip
> has learned their lesson.
I cannot imagine what lesson they needed to learn. They made a line
of extremely easy to use microprocessors that are about as cheap as
the package they come in. I should be so smart as they.
-Chuck Harris
More information about the time-nuts
mailing list