In my new arm7 design I was biased toward the atmel AT91 seriesbecause I like the AVR chips so much, but after some research and pointers by nice foks such as rickman and Leon, I decided to look toward other manufacturer's offerings. One thing I discovered is that the flash in the atmel chips (which have it) is slow! Thus using a ball grid type package such as the AT91FR40162 with 2Meg of flash does not give you high program execution speed. I guess you can just run from the 256k of on chip sram, but that should be taken into account when comparing this chip to others.
The Phillips LPC2214 has 16k of sram and 256k of flash, but that flash is fast...0 wait state. The bonus features you get on this chip that do not come on the 40008 or 40162 are dual SPI, I2C, 8 channel 10 bit ADC, 32 bit timers, dedicated PWM, and on chip crystal oscillator with PLL.
The LPC2214 seems like a better match for my application since it eliminates my need for an external ADC, external boot flash, external crystal, and gives me an SPI interface to my DAC. If the prices of the LPC21xx are any indication, it will also cost quite a bit less than the AT91.
I could actually use a LPC210x except for the lack of an external memory bus. If I took a simplistic but slow method of interfacing to a compact flash device (8 bit memory mode) using general IO, I guess I could use one of these instead. They are dirt cheap at around $5 from avnet (in stock).
Any idea of when the LPC2214 will come to full production?
Rick