The major Microcontroller manufacturers are all racing to be the leader for a general purpose ARM Cortex IC. Which one you choose really depends on your application and what features you are looking for. There is not one front runner who can cover all applications.
STM Microelectronics, Atmel, NXP and Texas Instruments all have M3 cores. NXP have recently introduced even lower power M0 and Freescale are the first to introduce the new M4 core.
Any experience of working with the above or any I have missed ?
Martin Keenan
I say TI are leading the way with ARM. Most of their new OMAP's are Cortex A8 based now and they've got the most M3's of any vendor. They've got some really awesome processors. Samsung also have big plans for the A9 we are led to believe - and STM are playing in this market with their Spear range
But one I got really interested in last year was the Atmel A5 range - didn't seem to materialise though, anyone got any information?
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4085371/ARM-stretches-out-with-A...
LStacey
There was quite a bit of noise made about the A5 being the ultimate Intel Atom killer but I don't know if anything ever went into production with it. That said, the whole "netbook" market seems to have had a major slow down.
Martin Keenan
I think the A5 core is a little lower end than netbook performance to be fair. I see it as more of an upgrade from ARM9 cores currently available. But maybe the issue is that vendors are shipping A8 based devices at such competitive prices there haven't been enough lead customers for A5 based processors thus far?
On netbooks and Atom, I think the A8/9 are gaining traction and there will be dual and quad cores shipping in netbooks soon. The i.mx51's customer reference design was a netbook,
here is Freescale at last yrs CES show
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrLa1qTVf34
iainmosely
Hi Pat,
We've used the STM32F103 family of parts and they work well with good functionality. So far we have used the USB, A/D, I2C, SPI and RTC peripherals all of which work well. The good thing is that there are a range of parts which are footprint compatible with different size flash memories.
We are programming using Keil tools and things generally work well. Will let you know how we get on.
Rgds, Iain