Microchip & OnSemi want to buy Atmel?

According to this, Microchip wants to buy Atmel (and split up its various lines, selling some of them to OnSemi) ---

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Atmel seems uninterested, though. Just as well. I don't think that if Atmel were bought and parted out that I as a customer would see anything good as a result...

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   Wim Lewis , Seattle, WA, USA. PGP keyID 27F772C1
Reply to
Wim Lewis
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Except that Atmel has been in self-destruction for at least the past two years.

...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

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Don't these people know there is a credit crunch! ;-)

Reply to
miso

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What has Atmel done to self destruct, please explain.

Reply to
Bob Eld

- The omission of mention of any Atmel Roadmaps, suggests this is a typical cynical harvesting effort ?

No mention is made of Atmel's CPLDs ? ( or of Atmel's R&D efforts...) Does Microchip even know what a CPLD is ?

Seems a strange move for Microchip. Maybe they are simply cashed up, and see a fire-sale-price, in an industry they know ? Or, a large Atmel shareholder wants out ?

On-Semi did just buy AMIS, but Microchip have always been more of a loner.

Is the MIPS32 not getting the traction they hoped, so they need a side-door to ARM, Cortex, or even AVR32 ? Maybe Automotive AVR's ?

The ATxmega is an interesting family, tho not yet in small packages.

The AT89LP are nice single-cycle 80C51's with a road map from 14 to 44+ pins

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

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Could be a really good deal for both Atmel and Microchip (maybe the industry). Atmel needs severe rationalising, yet have superb micro products (eg the Mega series). Microchip know superbly well how to do -cheap- yet only have third rate technology (eg the PICs). We'll know how interested Atmel are when Mchip put their final offer on the table.

Reply to
john jardine

No self destruct, but at least for one of my clients an Atmel field applications engineer promised that a new chip will be available in samples at the beginning of 4th quarter (I think it was the AT91SAM9G20), now looks like it is postponed to 1st quarter 2009, which is not good, because 2nd quarter 2009 samples of the end-product are planned for tradeshows. But maybe this is not the fault of Atmel, but of the field applications engineer, because I can't find a written promise of the date, and better wait one quarter instead of having a chip with bugs. But if I would have a say in planning (I'm only a software expert for this project and not responsible for the hardware), I would plan projects with chips which I have lying on my table, only.

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Frank Buss, fb@frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
Reply to
Frank Buss

Most of the engineering in Colorado Springs is gone.

...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

AVRs are designed in Norway. What do they do in Colorado?

Reply to
linnix

Just out of interest, tell me how to write a C function that takes a pointer parameter where the pointer may be either in code space or in RAM.

Reply to
larwe

On a sunny day (Fri, 3 Oct 2008 04:01:59 -0700 (PDT)) it happened larwe wrote in :

You fail to see the issue at hand. Small PICs, like the 8 bit, are ment to be programmed is asm. Sure, many grab, for reasons unknown to me, but likely incompetence with asm, for the first crappy C subset compiler at hand. Now _that_ is bad.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

C is lower level than Pascal, it wins there. Generally high level languages are good for newcomers (like tourists who use a phrase book while on a trip), but for real work one needs lower level (that is, if you will write a novel you better learn the language beyond the phrase book). With so many of the assembly languages being so poorly designed, no wonder C has gained its popularity, it thrives on poorly designed hardware platforms. And no wonder the resulting software is so messy, it takes an alphabet based language to write real novels (e.g. English) rather than a hyeroglyph based one (not many great pieces of literature written in Chinese or Japanese...).

Didi

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Original message:

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Reply to
Didi

Indeed it is... as long as you are happy with 8 bit addressing ;-)

Reply to
cs_posting

Funniest thing I've read in a long time. And laser accurate. :-P

Reply to
Uniden

That's no problem. The compiler just has to implement tests at runtime whenever the pointer is used to execute the PC load instructions with retlw for reading data in code space or a the mov instruction for reading RAM. To save code memory, this should be done in a subroutine. Maybe the easiest and most efficient way to program a PIC would be to implement a small Forth system for it, if you don't like assembler.

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Frank Buss, fb@frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
Reply to
Frank Buss

lement a small Forth

If PIC assembly was designed by a rabid wombat high on crack smoke, then Forth must have been designed by the same wombat tripping on LSD. ;-)

Reply to
sodaant

Funny, I shipped AT91SAM9G20 samples to customers in December 2007 :-) First production batches are already sold out, that is the cause of the delay.

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Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
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Reply to
Ulf Samuelsson

That is an issue with all true Harvard architecture. Same issue with the AVR.

You could conceivable pass a 24 bit pointer with a bit indicating which address space. Pointer handling would be more expensive, so the answer is normally, - you don't...

I usually copy flash constants to the stack before calling a routine which only supports RAM pointers.

You could conceivably reserve part of the address space for code, and another part for data and still keep the Harvard but that never happened.

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Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
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Reply to
Ulf Samuelsson

To waste your time trying to convince C coders of anything but C for uC's. We all know that real men program in "ASM" :)

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Reply to
Jamie

after it's creation, and popularity it has been worked over by two committes (and that shows a bit). I don't find it weird.

It struck me as being similar to other 3 register 8 bit CISC processors

by "real" you mean "ISO 10206" ?

It seems kind of limiting to me.

Bye. Jasen

Reply to
Jasen Betts

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