No we are not talking about a trip to a Tex-Mex restaurant but rather how the cloud driven world will compute going forward. Several years ago Tom Engebous of Texas Instruments was attributed to have said it’s “hardware that gets you to the table but software that seals the deal”. It was during this era that Texas Instruments was wrapping various software tools into their developer community through the acquisition of groups who had compilers, real time operating environments, mobile computing tools and my favorite area debugging capabilities through DSP-Bios. Now realized in the community as SYS-BIOS and best described by visiting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSP/BIOS Whether Mr. Engebous said this or not can be debated; but what can’t be debated is the validity of the premise. Before we start to review that topic let us first scan the waterfront of interesting chips available today for incorporation into the cloud driven connected computing model of tomorrow. In reviewing these silicon providers it is an observation by me that it’s very hard to differentiate the value proposition of one microcontroller from the other. I see the main players in this world to be Renesas, http://www.resesas.eu/ , Atmel, http://www.atmel.com/ , Freescale, http://www.freescale.com, Texas Instruments, http://www.ti.com/ Actel/ Microsemi, http://www.actel.com/ What will the user community use as a set of metrics to choose who to go with a design around? In the past it might have been service, support, price and free lunches from the sales team. The web and cost constraints have put this paradigm into the “Mad Man” era. Here is how I see each players strengths and who I would use for various application scenarios.
See: rowebots.blogspot.com for some great information on the chipset’s listed above
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