Hello,

I know that this post is a little late (a few months after-the-fact actually), but I’m sorry, Selbstdual is mentally challenged (I’d use the term “retard”, but I’m trying to be politically correct here). He obviously has no clue about engineering.

I work for a company that generates billions of dollars worth of revenue each year.
We have a strong presence in security, medical and safety.
We use PICs in lots of devices.
We also use Atmels in similar devices.

We had an interface board for a mobile video recorder (the kind the cops rely on) that used a PIC.
Well, we had to rev the board due to an obsolete OSD chip.
Since the original PIC code was written in assembly, and the engineer who was in charge of the re-design was an Atmel fan (and had a C-compiler), the PIC was replaced with an Atmel processor. That’s when we started having problems. The first wave of returns was caused by a code bug created by the engineer. It turned out to be easily fixed and we moved on. A year later we got another wave of returns. This time it was because Atmel made a small change without proper notification to their suppliers, or changing the part number, and our code broke because of it.

To make a long story short, a lot of a product’s reliability is dependent on the engineer not the part used. As for the PIC being a reliable part, Microchip has sold billions of them for a reason. There is no way, at their relatively low cost, that those sales were mainly to hobbyists. That’s a joke. One would have to be on glue to think so.



Picnaut