Does a project with a PIC still make sense? I have the impression that the PICs are no longer properly supported. In comparison, there are 100x more code examples and projects with the new MCUs. Does a PIC still have an advantage?
I went through this exact decision process a few years ago. I'd been away from the microcontroller world for some time and didn't know what had become the ascendent chips in the meantime.
I researched all the major parts and their manufacturers. I'd never worked with Microchip before so they and their parts were completely new to me, and I had no bias for or against them. I called everyone's Applications Engineers and asked about their programmers/debuggers, their IDE's (if any), their compilers (including costs), etc. I read lots of spec sheets and became familiar with their CPU cores and their peripherals. I looked at major distributors to see whose parts were most commonly stocked in high volumes (of course, this was pre-COVID).
In the end I went with Microchip and we now buy tens of thousands of MCU's from them every year. They weren't a slam dunk in every area but overall they were the best choice and I've never regretted it since. We now use three of their MCU's across a variety of products.
Key factors for me:
* Incredible customer support. Their App Engineering staff was chatty and informative before I made the decision, and since then has been awesome when we've had questions. The single best customer support experience I've ever had, in any area of life, was with Microchip. I was having difficulty making one of their peripherals work and next thing I knew they had me on a conference call with 6-7 people including an App Engineer, a Silicon Engineer, Sales droid, somebody from management, and a couple of others. They spent most of an hour on this question and kept me on the phone until there was nothing more to discuss. The effective hourly burn rate on their end was amazing and this was for our very first product using their parts, which meant we weren't generating any revenue for them yet. I told them how impressed I was at the end of the phone call and one guy said "We never forget a huge amount of our business starts with small companies."
* Free toolchain, at least to get started (and free forever unless you need the highest levels of optimization). Hence zero risk to give them a try.
* Reasonable compilers. This can turn into a religious argument pretty fast, but the bottom line is that most MCU work these days is done in C/C++ and as along as the compiler isolates you from the core architecture, the oddities don't really matter much. It's true that the PIC family can have some weird internals but unless you drop into Assembly for some tight optimization you'll never really feel it. And most such Assembly will be for very tight code sections where you won't run into the oddities (like bank switching) very often anyway.
* Excellent peripherals. Overall they just work as you'd expect, and often include some little extras that others don't. Example: Their CCP's have modes that will measure duty cycle, or full period, entirely in hardware - something I expected to need to do manually. Microchip also has some rather unique peripherals (example: their CTMU) which can be surprisingly useful in unexpected ways.
* Wide range of packages. You can get MCU's with 6 pins, 100+ pins, and everything in between. Sometimes within the same family, in which case you can share an architecture and just pick the package based on how many pins you need for a given design.
* Decent range of operational choices. If you only need 1% clock accuracy many of their parts have laser calibrated internal oscillators so you don't need external timing components at all. If you need tighter than that, just slap down a crystal and a couple of caps and you can have whatever accuracy you wish to pay for. Both are possible with the same part, which drops the number of separate SKU's you need to stock.
* Availability, even during COVID. Yes, their parts were hard to find and often out of stock at distributors. But if you start buying direct via MicrochipDirect.com they will sometimes work miracles for you. There was an order mixup during COVID that was going to shut down our production line, and they found a whole reel of parts and shipped them to us at normal pricing. We had a LOT more trouble with a LOT of other manufacturers but Microchip has been there for us.
One more that deserves special mention: SPEC SHEETS. OMG, trying to decypher the spec sheets of some microcontrollers is a nightmare. Sections in the front would rely upon, but never mention, a minor sentence buried way in the back in a seemingly unrelated section. Language strangeness that leads you down rabbit holes of insanity. Just getting stuff to work at the most basic level was soooo frustrating. In contrast, Microchip's spec sheets are very clear. They read like they were written by native English speakers (no offense to anyone, but technical documentation does not benefit from multiple layers of translation). For the most part they are well organized and logical. Yes, they have a few hidden details that can require some sleuthing (example: pins that default to analog mode which is only documented in the A/D converter section) but far, far fewer than most others. I seldom have any difficulty finding what I'm looking for, and seldom have to go blindly chasing for some secret answer buried in an otherwise unrelated area of the docs.
Are their parts perfect? No. Nobody's are. But we've been happy with our decision. We've since looked at other parts and other manufacturers because they offer some seemingly key advantage, but generally we can't get past their spec sheets. The overhead just isn't worth what may, or may not, be an advantage. So we keep working with Microchip. They helped us get started, they've supported us along the way, they've kept parts flowing to us, all without ugly surprises.
Most comments are complaints, so I like to spread good news when I can. Hope this helps someone.
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