Migration from PIC to ARM

[nctnico]

Again the other way around: if you are serious about selling microcontrollers in big volumes then the tooling costs are insignificant 

[ebclr]

Avoid renesas

Worst option

Extremely expensive development kits

Poor availability, is the last one you must chose

Only chose Renesas if you a million dollar account to buy processors, otherwise you are wasting your time

Cypress, STM, NXP , Texas are all better than renesas on customers service and product

Don't go with renesas even for free

[nctnico]

And yet the Hitachi (now Renesas) H8/300 and H8/3000 (IIRC) where quite popular in the late 90's / early 00's.

[Karel]

This is where morality comes into play. I wouldn't do anything mentioned earlier. If someone provides me with a tool that I find useful, I think it is the right thing to do to reward, not punish, that person.

Obviously it is up to each and everyone of us to help uphold morality for a society that we all collectively live in.

I don't get it. Since when is modifying GPL'ed software unmoral?
Do you think that everybody who download GPL'd software and don't click on the "donate" button are unmoral??

Microchip knows that they are using and modifying GPL'd software and they don't pay for it. Why should I pay to Microchip?

[ZeroResistance]

Avoid renesas

Worst option

Extremely expensive development kits

Poor availability, is the last one you must chose

Only chose Renesas if you a million dollar account to buy processors, otherwise you are wasting your time

Cypress, STM, NXP , Texas are all better than renesas on customers service and product

Don't go with renesas even for free

Huh? And I though they were the kings of the micrcontroller industry! 

[mikeselectricstuff]

And yet the Hitachi (now Renesas) H8/300 and H8/3000 (IIRC) where quite popular in the late 90's / early 00's.

Only for high  volume customers.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Just do a search for the Synergy part prefix R7FS on Findchips to see how bad an idea it would be to design these in, at least at the moment. Few parts even available in hundreds, let alone thousands. they clearly aren't aiming at customers who buy through distributors.

http://www.findchips.com/search/r7fs

[nctnico]

And yet the Hitachi (now Renesas) H8/300 and H8/3000 (IIRC) where quite popular in the late 90's / early 00's.

Only for high  volume customers.

No, not really. I have used them at various employers in low volume products. The distributors in the NL where pushing them quite hard (even provided the compilers for free). I liked the datasheets and user manuals because they where very clear. The biggest downside was that you needed NDAs and an expensive programmer to enable the code read protection.

[ebclr]

You're lucky, It's not  the experience that most people have with Renesas, Why use a product known for large corporations. That is not a product for small and medium enterprises. Also do not have any advantage over products from other vendors who are really interested in this public as ST, Texas, Cypress. Renesas must be avoided until they change the target market. It's not the product itself is the company sales structure the problem

[ElektroQuark]

There are no problems there: it's another market where they work.

[BloodyCactus]

If I were switching from PIC32 to ARM, I'd choose Kinetis, they have some nice chips and their Kinetis Design Studio runs on Linux which is a win for me

[ebclr]

Yes and the freedom boards are very nice and cheap, have a extensive range of product widely available, easy to get samples, nice support,and also mbed compatible, is for sure a much better option than renesas and all the major arm tools have support

[Sal Ammoniac]

Yes and the freedom boards are very nice and cheap, have a extensive range of product widely available, easy to get samples, nice support,and also mbed compatible, is for sure a much better option than renesas and all the major arm tools have support

The chips are not bad. The documentation, however, sucks big time.