Embedded World 2011 - Cortex-M3 everywhere

This year I renewed my visit to the Embedded World show in Nuremburg, Germany. Walking around the four halls that make up this big show it was simply impossible not to notice the ARM Cortex-M3 based controllers all around. Most chip manufacturers showed off boards with Cortex M3 devices, including ARM itself with their mbed board and other dev boards. There were also some Cortex-M4 demo's around from f.i. NXP (LPC4300) and Freescale (Kinetis).

This show was also rich in free kits; especially ST was very generously handing out STM32 and STM8 kits. I did not accept all of them, because I have no idea what to do with ‘em. Yet I did leave with (amongst others) a BeagleBoard-xM (thank you TI!), an FTDI Vinculo that I will review later on this blog and a ZigBee kit from ST. Fujitsu promised me to send me a Cortex-M3 kit by mail, I wonder if it will ever arrive.

Update 18/3: I received today a Fujitsu SK-FM3-100PMC kit, nicely boxed. More about it, hopefully soon, on this blog.

Due to a rather large amount of business meetings I did not see a whole lot of new or exciting things this year. However, I did get a demo of the very impressive new PIC32 compiler from MikroElektronika. These guys are definitely setting the new comfort standards for embedded software development. Wow! I always liked Microsoft’s Visual Studio, but this is way, way better. And the good news is that they are planning an ARM compiler too! At just under $300 (or $200 if you buy a board too) this is a bargain.

While I’m on compilers, Atmel too presented a new one: AVR Studio 5. This is a great tool too, and toujours completely free. V5 brings together AVR Studio 4 and AVR32 Studio into one IDE. It also integrates the AVR Software Framework (ASF) and over 400 example projects that used to be all over their website. Now you just pick your board and then the example that comes closest to what you want to do and off you go.

From the chip front I would like to mention the new ultra low-power 32-bit micro-controller family from Renesas, the RL78. Besides being low-power, this family is also ultra low-dollar. With an operating current of only 70 µA/MHz this is a direct competitor for the MSP430 from TI. But TI told me that they will announce an ultra-ultra-low-power MSP family later this year that will blow away the competition.
Microchip proudly announced their new PIC18F K80 micro. This is an 8-bit device that costs over one dollar, even at high quantities. This nicely illustrates the 8/32 bit paradox, but both Atmel and Microchip expect that the 8-bit market will continue to grow.

That is was not only Cortex-M3 all around proved Digi who had on display their pretty impressive ConnectCore Wi-i.MX51. As Digi's website says: "This module is a highly integrated and future-proof System-on-Module (SoM) solution based on the Freescale i.MX51 application processor with a high performance 600/800 MHz ARM Cortex-A8 core, powerful multimedia capabilities and a complete set of peripherals.".



The kit on the left is running Android, the kit at the right runs Ubuntu.
Digi's latest board, the ConnectCore Wi-i.MX53, was on display at the Freescale stand.
Rabbit 6000 modules are now available too.

Analog Devices showed me their new MEMS gyroscopes that have extremely low drift. So, I guess this is good news for the dead reckoning people.

FTDI presented a rather mysterious device, the FT1248. Although they did make it clear that this device communicates over a 1, 2, 4 or 8 bit wide bus of which the width can be adjusted on the fly, I did not grasp the reason of being of this chip. It is probably very useful or they wouldn’t have spent any time on it, but useful for what exactly? I guess that it is a bus extender of some sort, but I can’t find the data-sheet. Oh well, I am sure someone will figure this out for me.

I really like this show; I can hardly wait for next year.

Are you a PIC fanatic or an AVR lover?

Twenty years ago life was easy. Nobody really used the term embedded yet and there were only a few microprocessors to choose from. The choice was roughly limited to Intel’s 8051, the 6809 from Motorola, MOS Technology’s 6502, the Z80 by Zilog and maybe the H8 from Hitachi. These were all 8 bit processors. Personally I was a fan of the 6502 and I did not like the 8051. As a hobbyist building a computer system was rather a challenge because of the complicated board design due to the external memory and peripherals, but soldering was easy.
The integration of memory and peripherals into the chip turned the microprocessor into a microcontroller and made board design much simpler. The PIC that was introduced by Microchip somewhere in the early nineties was simple, some had EPROM on-board, and was cheap and easy to come by, which made it a good choice for hobbyists. The AVR introduced by Atmel a bit later was one of the first to include flash program memory which made it a good choice for hobbyists too.
Nowadays embedded has become a buzz word thanks to the thousands of different microcontrollers on the market. 8 bit, 16 bit, 24 bit, 32 bit, you name it, and it can be had. Some of the oldies are still around, like the 8051 in many incarnations, or the Z80 (by Rabbit Semiconductor). They are now faster of course and come with more options, but they are essentially the same as 20 years ago. Today building a microcontroller system is easy and within reach of most hobbyists, although the soldering has become somewhat more difficult.
Choosing a microcontroller on the other hand has become complicated. If we stick to the hobbyists we see two large user groups: PIC users and AVR users. Of course lots of hobbyists use other controllers, but these two families are probably the most popular. Now which family do you use? Are you a PIC fanatic or an AVR lover? Both families have flash memory and free development tools, both are cheap and easy to get. So how did you get into AVR or PIC? I have not been able to choose between the two, maybe you can help me? You can post your comments on this blog.