What is happening to Atmel EEPROMs?

They got rid of their fabs, and are now having to join the queue at TSMC or wherever they get their chips made. They are probably having to pay a lot more for them, because of demand for the manufacturing facilities. Microchip have their own fabs, and seem able to keep up with demand.

Not a good reason to design-in an Atmel processor then... I have one running in production volumes but need to update it, and another was going to go in to replace a Hitachi uC. We were going to use the ATmega 128L.

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At one point Microchip was trying to buy Atmel. What ever happened to that?

It fell through.

What other American firms have their own fabs? Intel, AMD, Micron... anymore?

Hul

Is this limited to EEPROM/Memory only or uCPU as well?

Definitely worth considering getting out of AVR. Do NPX ARM come with on-chip FLASH?

If you're asking about the Cortex M3/M0 ones that they're price targeting to go head to head with the 8-bitters, then yes. Though they only have flash, they don't have the few bytes of EEPROM that the AVRs threw in.

I simply cannot believe Atmel are going to drop all the AVR users in the sh*t.

I've been in electronics design and manufacturing since the mid 1970s and have seen these "crises" so many times.

At one time we used to buy a 74LS245 for 20 pence and months later they were £2.50 - a 12x rise.

How did this happen? Did the whole world suddenly want a 74LS245?

No.

What happened is that there was an over-supply of 74LS (following, guess what, a previous price bump) and the prices plummetted. So the distis, being cynical bastards, sent out their sales reps to spread stories of "74LS going on allocation".

"Allocation" is the word every buyer dreads because it means you don't get a lead time quoted, so basically you have to massively over-order, with several distis at the same time.

The stock of course arrives, some months later, and then you are over-stocked for a few years ;)

And the cycle repeats but the cynical bastard salesmen collected their commissions, left those companies, and are now marketing managers ;) So they never face the music.

Currently, there is a lot of crap being spread around about Allocation yet again, and sure enough people are starting to buy into it, and lead times are growing.

However, interestingly, we are likely to end up in a situation where our main products will be in two versions, one using the Hitachi H8/323 and the other using an Atmega128 (or whatever), but externally they will be exactly identical functionally. I have 5-10 year stock of the H8 in a safe, and will keep a similar stock of the ATmega.

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Yes, all of them have 128 bit wide flash that allows zero waitstate execution at the maximum CPU clock.

Not bad, I ordered a couple books on ARM off Amazon, may get into it finally. From what I see they are same price as AVR mega, low power and much faster. And NXP is very generous with samples.

I'd use the ATmega1281 as the ATmega128 is a bit old hat now (plus the ATmega1281 can run a little faster at 3.3V as it has a voltage vs. speed rating which the ATmega128 doesn't). If you want something a little smaller the ATtiny48 and ATtiny88 are nice chips. I'm quite a fan of the AVRs personally...

Mark.

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Was that back when supposedly the encapsulation epoxy plant burned down? Maybe that was different 'crisis'. lol!

I remember RAM becoming more expensive after each major earthquake in Asia some years ago.

I recall that !!

Yeah, very likely.

A Jap earthquake was another good one for lead times. The distis jump on anything.

The books on ARM may be too generic. Most of the things you need to know are in the user manual and the datasheet. NXP's Cortex based LPC1000 series need no assembly at all to get running. Even interrupt routines do not need special care.

While at least some memory chips are outsourced, the AVRs are still manufactured inside Atmel.

I get leadtime guides from distributors and many semiconductor companies have 20+ weeks leadtime right now.

Talked to one large customer who got 42 weeks lead time for mobile DDRs.

When lead times go up, some customers tend to order components from several suppliers, so apparent demand is higher than real demand, so anything in stock is swallowed up immediately.

If there is no stock, then it normally takes 16 weeks to produce new things for any semiconductor manufacturer.

Quite often, the fab capacity is not the problem, but testing is. If you can't buy new testers, then capacity cannot increase. Companies doing test equipment cant deliver, because they have long lead times on components. Hmmm...

Best Regards Ulf Samuelsson

ATmega128A is probably a better choice.

BR Ulf Samuelsson

The typical 32 bitters of today are implemented using advanced flash technologies which allows high density memories in small chip areas, but they are not low power.

The inherent properties of the process makes for high leakage. When you see power consumption in sleep of around 1-2 uA, this is when the chip is turned OFF. Only a small part of the chip is powered, RTC and a few other things.

When you implement in a 0.25u process or higher, you can have the chip fully initialized and ready to react on input while using

That is a big difference.

While the NXP devices gets zero waitstate from 128 bit bus, this also makes them extremely power hungry. An LPC ARM7 uses about 2 x the current of a SAM7. It gets higher performance in ARM mode.

The ARM mode has a price in code size, so if you want more features, then you better run in Thumb mode. The SAM7 with 32 bit flash is actually faster than the LPC when running in Thumb mode, (at the same frequency) since the SAM7 uses as 33 MHz flash, while the LPC uses a 24 Mhz flash. In thumb mode, the 32 bit access gives you two instructions per cycle so in average this gives you 1 instruction per clock on the SAM7.

Less waitstates means higher performance. By copying a few 32 bit ARM routines to SRAM, you can overcome that limitation. You can get slightly higher top frequency out of the LPC, but that again increases the power consumption.

For Cortex-M3 I did some test on the new SAM3, which can be configured to use both 64 bit or 128 bit memories. With a 128 bit memory, you can wring about 5% extra performance out of the chip compared to 64 bit operation. From a power consumption point of view it is probably better to increase the clock frequency by 5% than to enable the 128 bit mode. It is therefore only the most demanding applications that have any use for the 128 bit memory.

Testing on other Cortex-M3 chips indicate similar results.

Someone told me that they tried executing out of SRAM on an STM32 and this was actually slower than executing out of flash. Executing out of external memory also appears to be a problem, since there is no cache/burst and bandwidth seems to be lower than equivalent ARM7 devices.

Current guess is that the AHB bus has some delays due to synchronization. Also if you execute out of SRAM you are going to have conflicts with data access. Something which is avoided when you execute out of flash.

Would be curious to hear about other peoples experience about this.

Best Regards Ulf Samuelsson

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how does that make any sense? wheter an instruction is 16 or 32bit,

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-Lasse