Microchip to boost 8bit AVR range following acquisition

What is going to happen to Atmel’s 8bit AVR microcontrollers now that Microchip has bought the company?

Nothing bad, is the short answer, according to Microchip’s strategic marketing manager for 8bit MCUs Lucio Di Jasio.
“There is a new generation of AVRs coming in the summer, if anyone doubted it,” he said.
Long-time Microchip employee Di Jasio is now free to admit a secret admiration for the AVR architecture since it appeared in 1997 – with all the advantages that two decades of architectural innovation had delivered since 1976 when the first PIC was introduced.
According to Di Jasio, the 8bit PIC and 8bit AVR design teams (the latter based in Trondheim Norway), have more than warmed to each other since they were merged following the acquisition.
“It was like twins separated at birth. Most people in Microchip 8bit division are really excited. We talked to the Atmel 8bit guys, and we realised we came up with same solutions for same customers,” he said. “Atmel had been focusing on its [ARM] Cortex-based 32bit parts, and they were pleased that Microchip focuses on 8bit. We really believe in 8bit continuing to develop, and we are going to do the same for AVR. We have consistency of purpose.”
That said, from the 32bit point of view, “the addition of all the new Cortex devices represents an important expansion of our portfolio”, added Di Jasio.
New AVRs
With the introduction of its ‘F1’ PICs five years ago, Microchip added what it calls Core Independent Peripherals – peripherals that can be set-up to co-operate while the processing core concentrates on other tasks, or sleeps to save power.
Microchip’s view is that these peripherals are most valuable when they are used to stretch the performance of low-pin-count PICs – 14-28pins – as it allows them to be used in applications not normally open to 8bit parts.
Atmel has Event System, a mechanism through which peripherals can communicate, and has been modifying peripherals to work with it.
“Atmel had done some development of core-independent peripherals, but put the innovation into the XMega family – very large chips with a lot of pins,” said Di Jasio. “We immediately discussed putting the core-independent peripherals into its [lower pin-count] Tiny and Mega ranges.”
And these are the parts that will start to appear in September.
Microchip doesn’t have a name for the logic in PICs that does the same job as Atmel’s Event System, and Atmel never separately branded its core-independent peripherals.
“We are merging our vocabulary for when we talk to customers,” said Di Jasio. “There is going to be a lot of cross-pollination.”
Tools
Both firms have integrated development environments – MPLAB for Microchip and Atmel Studio for Atmel.
Is Microchip going to combine them?
“These are two pretty complete tool sets, and there is no way of saying one is better than the other,” said Di Jasio. “We want to be very cautious as we move along because it gets very personal to developers very quickly.”
Some are resisting integration:
Microchip made a major change to MPLAB six years ago, moving from PC-only MPLAB 8 to Java-based MPLAB-X which works on Windows, Linux and MacOS.
“I still meet customers that say MPLAB 8 was much better, and people still download it every day,” said Di Jasio.
On the flip-side:
“Some users have been using both Microchip and Atmel architecture for many years and immediately asked us to unify,” said Di Jasio. “Our main concern is that we don’t want to alienate users; we don’t want people to think we are going to dictate the future.”
So any changes are going to happen slowly and carefully: “We see some low-hanging fruit,” said Di Jasio. “It is easy to merge some pieces under the same umbrella.”
One of those is compilers.
C compilers for PIC24 and PIC32 microcontrollers are derivatives of the GCC architecture and are already integrated into MPLAB-X. As the AVR compiler is also GCC-derived, it would fit onto the hooks already in MPLAB-X.
Atmel’s ‘Start’ automatic code generation is another.
Microchip has a tool – both MPLAB-based and web-based – called Code Configurator that simplifies the creation of start-up code. The user selects a particular PIC and fills in a series of dialogue boxes that describe the required initial state of on-die peripherals. The tool automatically writes C to set the chip into that state.
Atmel’s Start is similar, but only works for Atmel’s 32bit processors – a situation that is due to change in September when Start will support the new 8bit AVR product line.


http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/products/micros/microchip-to-boost-8bit-avr-range-following-acquisition-2016-07/