Microchip Technology Introduces New Family of 40MHz 3V PIC18F Flash Microcontrollers

Interesting. 3.6V max with a lower (externally regulated) voltage for the core.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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The real question is why is it so poor? It runs at 3v, but must be really old technology. The Ubicom ip2k is a super PIC, has been out since 2000, runs at 3.3 or 2.5 volts, is 5 volt tolerant and runs at

160 MHZ and MIP. I would expect a price premium for speed, but the ip2k is not that expensive.

Intel p4 processors run at close to 4 GHZ, why do you lag so much? 2 orders of magnitude? Could someone explain while single chip micros are so far behind the state of the art? The fastest 8051 and Pics are way to slow for this time in the industry.

If you guys cannot build your own fast PICs why not just buy Ubicom? There is no "x" in my email address.

The demand is not there. Also high frequency clock are bad for EMC if the designer does not know what he or she is doing.

All in all, frequencies beyond about 100Mhz are simply not neccesary for what people are buying them for. In most control applications, the sample rates are extremely low. Even driving something like a character LCD screen doesn't require that fast of a chip.

Personally I don't mind them increasing the speed of chip, keeps me employed.

--

Wing Wong.

to 4 GHZ, why do you lag so much? 2

If you need more speed, use an ARM or something. If there was a significant demand for high speed 8 bitters more companies would make them.

cheers,

Al

I suppose, if a fast 8 bitter was absolutely required, the easiest to get a fast 8 bitter would be to implement one in FPGA logic. There are many free cores out there.

P.S Al, I see you lurk here too!

--

Wing Wong.

I remember a similar quote about 640K being enough memory for anyone? If speed and pins were not important why would microchip be advertizing their new chip as:

Microchip Technology Inc. today announced the first ten members of its high-pin count, high-density memory PIC18F87J10 Flash microcontroller family, which double the performance in low-voltage applications by delivering up to 10 MIPS at 3V.

This implies to me that more memory, more speed and more pins is desireable. It seems that embedded devices that can connect directly to ethernet or WIFI would be desireable.

My question is why are the single chippers (which should have big advantages in memory access and EMI), soo slow?

There is no "x" in my email address.

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Power, a 4Ghz Ipod will not be attractive to many consumers due to 20 D cells you have to hang around your neck, to say nothing of the noise the fan would make. More pins, memory and speed are generally desireable, but battery technology simply hasn't kept pace with the silicon.

Indeed, that's what many are doing for many different reasons. I needed a fast 8051 to leverage 10 years of stability in a large (>256k) assembler app. An FPGA with a fast (not free) 8051 core was my choice.

-- Alf Katz

snipped-for-privacy@remove.the.obvious.ieee.org

"Good, Fast, Cheap: pick any two" - my company motto.

I know what you mean about ARM. However, there are other 8 bit micros that are faster and cheaper than the PIC18 series. I am thinking of devices such as Atmel ATmega168. 20MIPS at 20MHz. The lower clock rate is usually an advantage in passing EMC compliance tests.

Atmel also offer an 8051 core that can match this speed, however the AVR will perform better with high level languages. (more registers and much more efficient memory addressing)

regards, Johnny.

Pentiums don't cost $3 and run from coin cells, generally.

-Andrew

A large factor is memory speed. Flash is slow. 40MHz is quite fast for Flash. If you want to go faster than that, then you have to start implementing caching. You're then dealing with a different type of CPU.

Cheers, Jon

"Jon Beniston" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com...

To my knowledge the pics run at an instruction rate of 10Mhz (@40MHz clock). So the Flash only operates at 10Mhz.

MIKE

I believe the 30 Mhz dspics use an internal pll to up the internal frequency to 120Mhz (to run at 30Mhz instruction rate), so the flash is operating at 30MHz.

Alternatively who needs a pentium (or similar) with all its power consumption/dissipation and ancillary circuit to do things like heating control, when it would become the main heating element!

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clock).

I've added this paragraph to the article to clarify this point:

All PIC18 microcontrollers execute one instruction every machine cycle. A machine cycle is 4 clock cycles. This gives 10 MIPS performance @40 MHz and translates into 10 MHz access to either internal or external Flash memory. With the internal 4 x PLL circuit, an external 10 MHz crystal can be used to obtain an internal 40 MHz clock.

-Bill Giovino Executive Editor

Who needs a heater element and a heater controller, when you can vary the processor sleep times :-). The Pentiums even have some over- temperature protection.

Paul

The new dsPICS I'm using operate at up to 30 MIPS with a 120 MHz clock, using a PLL. A range of 16-bit PICS will be coming out, using the same technology. The dsPICs do use a lot of power, though - over 100 mA at maximum speed. Apart from that, they are nice chips.

Leon

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Because speed isn't always the most important factor. Speed is also not an independent variable that can change without affecting other things. It's hard to speed something up without also increasing power consumption or noise.

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Darin Johnson
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