26 Jun
2012
26 Jun
'12
8:30 p.m.
On 26 Jun 2012 at 21:26, David Riley wrote:
Check out Freescale's Kinetis family, if
you're interested. Pretty
similar peripheral set and size range.
Looks interesting, but daunting! 200 products in the Kinetix family--
good grief, by the time I've chosen a product, 10 new ones will
probably have been hatched!
One aspect that I don't like about Microchip MCUs in general is their
use of proprietary toolsets. For instance, PIC32 device programming
is done via SPI using Microchip programmers (e.g. PICKIT3), but that
SPI is converted to EJTAG on-chip. There are JTAG pins, but no one
makes something that programs the PIC32 via commodity JTAG.
Downright strange that. I guess it sells programmers.
Well, I like them for CDR tasks because it's
really easy to make
a clock-efficient digital PLL with one. I'm comfortable with
them and feel pretty confident that I could create a pretty
robust implementation without worrying about whether I have the
processing horsepower to handle the load.
FPGAs and microcontrollers are definitely overlapping areas; but I'm
a little more at home doing work with software rather than VHDL. I
guess it's mostly a matter of what you're comfortable with. And, as
you've pointed out, FPGAs suffer the same "use our toolset" issues
that some MCUs do.
Thanks for the pointer to the Freescale stuff. I've got some reading
to do.
--Chuck