[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



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