Category — Embedded

I’ve had a fun time watching CAD pricing gyrations, especially Alibre’s pricing. TI has also varied pricing on Code Composer Studio (CCS) Platinum; most of the time it’s been $3595, it was $995 for a couple months, and it’s been around $2000. All the time the annual maintenance was $600/year.

Now a new node-locked license is $445 and annual maintenance is $99/year. A floating license is $795 with annual renewal at $159/year. TI calls this Promotional Pricing, so the price may go up, but with the drop in the yearly maintenance, I think they’ll keep the prices low.

Deelip and others think pricing too low is bad for CAD. I think there’s a point to this: the CAD (and embedded) market size is only somewhat elastic, and there are significant switching costs, so if you cut prices too much, your market size won’t increase much, but your revenues will go down.

However, TI is in the semiconductor business, not the software business, and the point of CCS is to sell more TI chips. Also, unlike the CAD space, there is significant open source competition (gcc and such). My guess is that TI will, over several years, significantly benefit from this; I suspect a major goal is to increase microcontroller developers’ familiarity with the rest of the TI processor (MCU, MPU, DSP) lineup. For example, my brother is more likely to design in a TI C6000 or OMAP processor after this price cut.

CCS is a great value; it includes the IDE and development tools for all of TI’s processors (MSP430 MCU, C28xx DSP, Stellaris MCU, C5000 DSP, C6000 DSP, TMS570 safety MCU, high-end ARM, etc) and a royalty free run time license for TI’s DSP/BIOS RTOS. Most commercial embedded IDE’s are quite pricey, typically starting at $1000 or more for a single architecture.

There’s always one company has has to different.   Back when Maxtor was independent, they spun their disks backwards from everyone else, and numbered their heads from top to bottom, instead of bottom to top like everyone else does.

Microchip is acting the same.  When everyone else, it seems, is using ARM cores for microcontrollers, they picked MIPS cores for the PIC32 micro-controller (MCU) family.  Their new IDE, MPLAB-X is based on NetBeans, instead of Eclipse.

I don’t think the MIPS versus ARM core is a big deal; maybe Microchip got a much better deal from MIPS.  Switching between ARM MCU vendors isn’t easy because all the peripherals are different.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s easier to port C code from a PIC24 (16-bit proprietary) to a PIC32 (32-bit MIPS) than from (to take a random example) an Atmel SAM7 to a TI Stellaris MCU simply because the peripherals are much more similar on the PIC MCUs.

On the other hand, I don’t see the advantages of NetBeans over Eclipse.  Both are Java-based IDEs.  Both are open source.  Both are cross-platform.  (Note that an IDE based on either one might not be cross-platform, depending on device drivers for emulators and such.  TI’s Code Composer Studio V4 (based on Eclipse) only runs on Windows; V5 adds Linux.  MPLAB-X has beta downloads for Windows, Linux, and Mac).

NetBeans is primarily known for an excellent GUI builder, which typically isn’t important in embedded development.  I don’t know of any other companies using it for embedded development (or non-Java programming).  Even in the Java world, it’s been a distant second to Eclipse.

Eclipse has been used for non-Java programming (e.g. the C Development Tools or CDT) and embedded programming for a long time, and has many companies supporting it.  So Eclipse should develop a lot faster than NetBeans, and has the advantage of many more plugins.  Plus, Eclipse is run by an independent foundation, not by a company (Oracle) that likes to get paid.

Microchip is not very supportive of open source (unlike most ARM MCU companies).  On the good side, the PIC32 compiler lite version does not have any code size limitations; instead, Microchip removed optimization support.

Microchip is also a good source of low pin count chips, and is one of the few companies still selling MCUs in easy to prototype plastic DIP packages.  For example, you can get a 16-bit dspPIC33F with a CAN controller in 28 pin SOIC, QFN, and DIP packages.

I find Microchip’s mTouch Metal over Capacitor technology interesting: it allows capacitive sensing of metal buttons.

Stellaris Eval Kit box

I now have a TI Stellaris LM3S8962 evaluation kit.  Specs include a 50MHz Cortex M3 core, 64K on chip RAM, 256K on chip flash, 10/100BaseT Ethernet with IEEE-1588 support, CAN, a 128×96 OLED, a virtual serial port (via USB), and JTAG (also via USB).   It’s pretty amazing that a commodity (<$10) MCU is much more powerful than the first personal computers such as the Apple II, Commodore 64, and CP/M systems.  (I’ve always thought it would be interesting to see how CP/M would run on a 50MHz Zilog eZ80, which should be about 200 times faster than a 4MHz Z80).

I like TI’s packaging: they stick everything into the box using two-ring CD-ROM holders.

Unboxing LM3S8962 kit

Below is a picture of the board running an eLua demo program.  eLua is a reduced size version of the Lua scripting language that can run on many MCUs.

eLua on the LM3S8962 kit