PIC18F97J60 vs. MCF5223x for embeddet networking applications

For one thing the PIC18F97J60 is not capable of 100Base-T operation, it is 10base-T only. The MCF5223x is 10/100 capable. I have experience with the MCF52235, but not the PIC18F97J60. However, I have used the ENC28J60 ethernet controller which is similar to the ethernet used by the PIC18F97J60. I would expect the MCF5223x to be at least an order of magnitude faster than the PIC18F97J60.

You can get a free, but limited, version of the CMX-MicroNet TCP/IP stack for the MCF52235 on the CMX Systems web site. See the demos and manuals section at

(The demo software is intended to be for evaluation purposes only.)

An evaluation version of CMX-MicroNet for the PIC24/dsPIC33 and ENC28J60 ethernet is also available on the CMX web site.

Paul Bosselaers CMX Systems, Inc.

The MCF5223x has a ColdFire core (32-bit, lovely architecture, a wide range of good tools, plenty of speed, power-efficient for its speed) and plenty of flash and ram. It can also be seen as a stepping point to a bigger system (such as using a different ColdFire with external memory, which could then run something like ucLinux). The PIC has a PIC core (8-bit, hideous architecture, a few usable tools, slow, but low power) and limited flash and ram. There are plenty of small PICs with nice peripherals, but it's a dead end if you ever want to move upwards.

So the MCF5223x is a great deal more capable, although probably slightly more expensive (though not a lot, when you look at the whole board).

As always, however, a lot depends on things like experience, vendor support, future plans, tools, etc.

Thank you David and Paul.

This is an important point.

I've got some expereince with both PIC's and 68k programming (in the early days of the Macintosh). I also did a couple small apps for my Palm (Dragonball). In that case I used a gcc as a cross compiler under Linux/X86. I'm hoping to find a similar environment for MCF5223x as well. I'm more comfortable with emacs, make, and gcc than CodeWarrior.

Petter

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They do cheap Coldfire modules and also sell development kits. Look into Eclipse+gcc+debugger of choice for your development environment. I haven't tried to plug Emacs into Eclipse. Eclipse is Java, though, so you might want to have a fast system.

~Dave~