PIC32 - how's it selling?

[Pavius]

About a year ago i attended the microchip master's conference in Arizona. Everyone was talking about the MIPS - how it's better but how difficult it will be to convince customers to choose it over the ARM. Question is, one year later, what is the adoption rate of the PIC32? I see little to no PIC32 related questions on this board and any 32 bit/powerful processor discussions are about some flavor of ARM - is that indicative?

If am beating a dead horse, please point me in the direction of forum threads/articles/whatever. I searched google/the forum and bubkes.

 

[be80be]

I don't think to many here are playing with a pic32 you can't bread board it LOL If it
was a p-dip you'd see more using it I have some in there nice little box haven't found a break out board for them

 

[Noggin]

I use the PIC32 in a couple of projects and I think they're great. I'm using them to drive a 320x240 color graphic LCD among other things. There are a few things I don't like about them but the majority of my dislikes stem from the fact that I dislike Microchips documentation.

One thing I don't like about the PIC32 that I got used to on the smaller PICs (not sure if all smaller pic's have them or not though) is the lack of a set bit in register instruction. Now, when you clear a flag or modify a register, its not guaranteed to be atomic. So if you want to set an output pin its a read/modify/write and if you get interrupted between read and write the potential exists to read, modify, interrupt, modify same register, exit interrupt, overwrite what the interrupt just wrote. So now there are annoying set and clear registers. Just gotta be careful now.

I also wish they came in a 1 meg flavor. I'm sitting on 98% utilization of a PIC32 512k part and around 80% utilization on another PIC32 512k part.

And optimization is TERRIBLE!!!! 0.07% space savings from turning optimization all the way up vs having it off. But I've never been impressed with the optimization with any of the PIC compilers. There is no reason for "for (i = 0; i < 100; i++);" to compile into code unless i is declared volatile. Neither hi-tech nor microchip's compiler seems to do optimize it out though.

 

[Pavius]

What made you choose it over an ARM based uC? Simply the fact that you had experience with smaller PICs or was it objectively more suited for your application than something like the AT91SAM?

 

[Noggin]

I chose it because I had experience with smaller PIC's, specifically the PIC24 in this case. I was already driving the LCD with an application using the PIC24 and I decided that it didn't have enough horsepower. By switching to the PIC32 I was able to reuse 90% of the code I had already written.

I only learned about the AT91SAM a few days ago. I only read about it for a couple of minutes. I like AVR's a lot more than the PIC16's and below, I wouldn't mind giving the AT91SAM a shot in a project. However, I don't expect to use it much as the company I work for is a Microchip design partner.