[sdiy] Microchip to acquire Atmel

[rsdio at audiobanshee.com]

On Feb 16, 2016, at 5:29 PM, David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Feb 2016, Neil Johnson wrote:
>> Interesting....
>> 
>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/15/microchip_atmel/
> 
> Why do I have this cynical suspicion that Microchip will attempt to sabotage and eventually discontinue the AVR line of microcontrollers?

At first, I was going to ask, "Why would Microchip bother to buy a company for $3.6 billion and then throw their product away?" … but then I realized that Atmel's Flash business alone might be worth all those billions. I guess the real question is whether all of Atmel's other technology is worth $3.6 billion without the AVR, or if Microchip actually wants the AVR as well.

I recently asked a friend, "Is AVR even relevant any more now that ARM is so prevalent?" His response was that ARM is primarily a 32-bit architecture, while AVR is 8-bit. The fact that they're both RISC makes them seem interchangeable at the very beginning of a design, although that is only one aspect of comparison. Even when the chips get down to similar prices and packages, sometimes it just makes more sense to design around an 8-bit instead of taking on the complication of a 32-bit architecture.

Considering the difficulties that nearly every compiler has with PIC 8-bit families, the AVR might save Microchip a lot of support issues. They need an 8-bit MCU, so they might as well leverage the more streamlined design. I'm assuming that the AVR compilers aren't as messed up as the PIC compilers.

Brian