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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Thursday, November 12, 2009

A little bit of Arizona in Berkshire

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A couple of days ago I encountered Steve Sanghi, CEO of Microchip, at the dedication of Microchip’s new European Headquarters and customer training site near Reading, UK. He paints a characteristically upbeat view of the microprocessor/microcontroller sector’s prospects for 2010 – he’s looking for a recovery in many aspects of his business, back to the product-sales-rates Microchip was achieving before the Big Downturn – within just a couple more quarters. However, in contrast to the prospects for Asia, recovery in both US and European markets warrant the term “fragile” in Steve’s presentation; much of the recovery we’ve seen so far is, he believes, the result of government (multiple governments) stimulus packages, and it remains to be seen if those markets have been set back on their feet, to resume growth once the extra support is phased out.
As you’d expect, a good bit of Sanghi’s presentation was about Microchip’s microcontroller line, and about how it is the only company with a fully-scalable, harmonised product line across 8, 16 and 32-bit architectures. Microchip’s 32-bit, Pic32 devices, Sanghi asserts, lead ARM – specifically, many of the Cortex-M3-based implementations, “in many measures”, such as code size – and power. Microchip, you’ll recall, went to MIPS for its 32-bit core (it’s an M4K core) and has done a lot of work “under the hood” of its tool set to preserve look-and-feel between that and its home-grown 8- and 16-bit parts.
The power claims relate to Microchip’s XLP implementations where the target of Sanghi’s comparisons switches from “brand A” to “Brand T” (I’d be prepared to hazard a guess that means the TI MSP 430 series) where he says that, “many independent [customer] testimonials,” place the Microchip line ahead in the life that a typical low-duty-cycle application will wring from a battery.

Related entries in: Power Management | Processors/ Software/ Tools |

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