ELAN micro experience

Does anyone on here have experience using ELAN micros from Taiwan? Especially experience using C with these. Positives, negatives, horror stories?

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In particular this unit

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Reply to
gobraves
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I'm not sure why you would want to use these - are they very cheap and are you planning on huge quantities ? The architecture does not look very C friendly - have you found a C compiler for them ?

Michael Kellett

Reply to
MK

We are using something similar to this. We spent six months getting up to speed with helps from someone familiar with the chip. You first step is to find someone who has done design with this before. OTP is a pain in the A** at the very least.

Why do you think it is not C friendly? In fact, with R10 to R3F memory mapped registers, it is very C friendly.

That's a different story.

Reply to
linnix

Unless you are doing colossal volumes or something unusual, I can't see how any chip that takes 6 months to get up to speed with would be preferable to something that's better supported...

Reply to
Mike Harrison

ow any chip that takes 6

tter supported...

The cost is much less than $1 each. So, the customer gave us the link and said "check it out". Three prototype runs and six months later, we are almost ready with it. Of course, we have other alternatives and production plans running at the same time.

Reply to
linnix

st

s

how any chip that takes 6

better supported...

Large volumes of these with the cost has been the driving factor (millions of units annually kind of volume). Previous work had been done in China in assembly and these ELAN micros seem to dominate over there because of the cost. I decided to bring development work back to the US though because the response in China is poor and when they get to a roadblock they tend to throw up their hands and just quit working on it. Plus, we want to expand the product offering and keep it under the radar screen as long as possible before someone else gets wind of it.

Funny thing is we are also about 6 months into the development and when I brought development back I had wanted to have the work done in C which I thought would open more doors here from outside work. May have been seriously wrongo on that assumption.

So far my programmer has worked around about 10 bugs in the compiler and while he seems to have the staying power of Job he's getting frustrated as well.

Reply to
gobraves

how any chip that takes 6

better supported...

We have exact the same problem.

No, they just want more money.

Or your supplier becomes your competitor.

We have to fix the compiler as well. One version put the data space in LCD ram. So, no LCD at all if using the Compiler. I am a strong advocate of C or other high level language, but I am knee deep in Assembler right now.

Reply to
linnix

any chip that takes 6

better supported...

Just glancing at the architecture (eg. 13-bit instructions -sort of a PIC12-16/8051 Brundleprocessor) and instruction set, I think I'd tend to go with assembly for this kind of micro. Maybe prototype in C (on another platform), but translate to assembly (and back too). I hope they at least have a decent emulator.

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

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