In comp.arch.embedded Spehro Pefhany said:
Some of the new 18F chips have serious issues with operation above
25MHz (IIRC ??), or even, reportedly, 4MHz, despite being called
"40MHz" chips. There are ugly workarounds to allow 40MHz operation on
only some of them.
Sanghi needs to shake things up there..
The impression I get is that Microchip are gambling the whole company on
dsPIC - and that's late and not winning hearts and minds. There's a nice
legacy business in PIC16 and before, but a generation of new embedded
engineers have grown up with AVRs and suchlike and don't automatically
think of Microchip when starting a low-end design.
Trouble is, dsPIC takes them into a market segment that's already pretty
well mapped out - there's plenty of good micros and low-end DSPs in that
market space and Microchip doesn't have mind-share in those sectors.
PIC17 failed dismally. PIC18 is limping badly (not helped by the fact
that it was meant to be C-friendly and the compilers were diabolical for
quite a lot of the family's early life). dsPIC is not taking off. Unless
they have a big success in the near future it looks like "interesting
times" for Microchip.
Basically, I think they only have three things going for them:
(1) keeloq
(2) packaging, peripherals etc.
(3) the legacy market.
IMHO, dsPIC (despite the fact that it's a decent enough architecture,
and combines many good features of PIC-like Harvard RISC, conventional
micros and low-end DSP) shouldn't have happened. Microchip should've
licensed ARM for higher-end applications, put their own peripherals
onto an ARM core and provided a software emulator or a binary
translator for PIC16 apps...
pete
