[sdiy] Avr32???

[Eric Brombaugh]

I remember looking at these a few years back and being somewhat 
underwhelmed at the time. It looks like there have been some additions 
and improvements in the product line since I last checked though. There 
have been a few DIY projects published on the web that are based on 
these parts but overall they don't seem to get much attention.

The DSP capabilities are reasonably useful, but not up to the standards 
of a true DSP with zero-overhead looping and parallel operand 
prefetching so filtering operations will suffer in comparison to devices 
like the dsPIC, 56k and TMS320.

Feature-wise they have a good selection of peripherals and packages. The 
UC3C variants have an FPU which could come in handy, but the smallest 
package for those is 64-pin and you really have to go to the 144-pin 
parts to get the most from the I/O and those are expensive. UC3B parts 
have smaller packages and lower prices but also lack peripherals (I2S & 
12-bit ADCs) that would be useful for audio. Interrupt architecture 
looks pretty good and goodness but they've got a lot of shadow registers 
for fast context switches.

Max clock speed is 66MHz which doesn't compare favorably with some of 
the common ARM products out there, and Flash memory access requires wait 
states at speeds above 33MHz (something that's fairly common in ARM 
parts too), so I don't quite see where the "much faster" comparison 
comes from.

Atmel AVR devtools are well regarded and free as well, so that's a big 
advantage.

Pricing looks a bit on the high side compared to some of the newer ARM 
Cortex M stuff that's coming on line lately.

Definitely worth consideration, but by no means a slam-dunk win over 
other architectures.

Eric

On 02/24/2012 12:07 PM, James Patchell wrote:
> I have very minimal experience. I bought an eval board a few years ago,
> and played with it. It is a very powerful little processor. The hardware
> looks similar to the ARM, but it is much faster, or so it would seem
> from reading Atmel Lit. I have been itching to do something with one of
> these myself.
>
> Best thing about it, it has a very nice set of GNU tools that are FREE!
>
> -Jim
>
> On 2/24/2012 6:19 AM, Dan Snazelle wrote:
>> Anyone here have experience using these for synth applications?
>>
>> I was reading that it has dsp features.
>> Looked interesting.