Microcontrollers Roadmap

What is the best microcontroller and programming language?

FAMILIES to learn: for my digital portal, list all digital chip families and types

Compare: Target audience, languages available, free compiler?, development board, cost of module.

digital electronic devices table:

• language

• popularity

• cost

• Compilers and assemblers

• other available languages

• number of boards

• number of books

• amount of support (code and forums)

families:

• ARM. Sitara ARM Processor, Beagle. ARM express family from Coridium.
• Basic Stamp
• Arduino (Based on Atmel AVR)
• PIC
• PIC with Configurable Logic Cell (CLC) hybrid
• For Single Board Computer (SBC): BeagleBoard, Gumstix,Raspberry Pi
• AVR (AT series). Arduino.
• Propeller
• LatticeMico8 (soft embedded)
• stay away from Make Controller Kit (nothing about it is standard)
• PICAXE
• Microchip PIC
• Basic Stamp 2
• Propeller
• Arduino
• Make controller
• [1]
• [2]
• [3]
• [4]
• Arduino
• Basic ATOM
• BASIC Stamp
• ARM express
• BASIC Stamp
• PICAXE
• [PIC]
• C Stamp
• [Atmel AVR]
• ARM processors (from many vendors) using ARM7 or Cortex-M3 cores are generally microcontrollers
• Atmel AVR (8-bit), AVR32 (32-bit), and AT91SAM (32-bit)
• Microchip PIC (8-bit PIC16, PIC18, 16-bit dsPIC33 / PIC24)
• ARM

Atmel

• AT90, ATtiny, ATmega, ATxmega series (AVR architecture) (Atmel Norway design)
• AVR32 (32-bit AVR architecture) (Atmel Norway design)

Lattice Semiconductor

• Mico8 8-bit soft microprocessor
• Mico32 32-bit soft microprocessor

Microchip Technology

Microchip produces microcontrollers with 3 very different architectures:

8-bit (8-bit data bus) PICmicro, with a single accumulator (8 bits):

• PIC10 and PIC12: 12-bit instruction words
• PIC16 series: 14-bit instruction words, one address pointer ("indirect register pair")
  • PIC16F628 (Replacement for very popular but discontinued PIC16F84)
  • PICAXE
• PIC18 series: 16-bit instruction words, three address pointers ("indirect register pairs")

16-bit (16-bit data bus) microcontrollers, with 16 general-purpose registers (each 16-bit)

• PIC24: 24-bit instruction words
• dsPIC: based on PIC24, plus DSP functions, such as a single-cycle MAC (multiply–accumulate) into two 40-bit accumulators.

32-bit (32-bit data bus) microcontrollers:

• PIC32MX series: 32-bit instructions, uses the MIPS architecture

Altera

soft microprocessor

Xilinx

• Microblaze 32-bit soft microprocessor
• Picoblaze 8-bit soft microprocessor