Submitted by In 2017, we saw several new MCUs hit the market, as well as general trends continuing in the industry: the migration to open-source, cross-platform development environments and toolchains; new code-generator tools that integrate seamlessly (or not so seamlessly…) into IDEs; and, most notably, the continued invasion of ARM Cortex-M0+ parts into the 8-bit space.
I wanted to take a quick pulse of the industry to see where everything is — and what I’ve been missing while backed into my corner of DigiKey’s web site. It’s time for a good ol’ microcontroller shoot-out.
Interesting read. No controller architecture is good at everything so why not deploying multiple different architectures? Like an ARM for number crunching and an 8051 for bit toggling. Dev tools would need to support this and they probably don’t. The low cost of chips seems to beg this solution.