Hey guys im trying to choose a good efficient 32-bit MCU in terms of superior battery life, high clock speed, and easy to learn/program and debug which one is better: Microchip PIC or freescale??

Thanks

 

How much do you want to spend on development tools? Are you more familiar with Motorola or Microchip CPUs?

 

Hi,
You can try 32 bit Pic Microcontroller. I have not used any 32 bit PIc but I have used 8bit PIc 12F/16F/18F series and now using 16bit pic 24F/24H and DSPIc. I found those very efficient,useful and reliable and basing on that experience, I suggest that you can try 32 bit Pic Microcontroller. Pics are really wonderful. I never used Motorola. Thanks.

 

Depends on what you want to do. Freescale's 32-bit line has been around a lot longer than Microchip's PIC32. The PIC32's core was not developed by Microchip. It is a MIPS core and so very different from the other PICs. Freescale has both their Coldfire and ARM based 32-bit devices. Go to their respective websites and take a look around.

 

I'm using Microchip's Pic because it has a really good resourches on the net and it has really good supporting system for user.

 

Yes, the resources of Microchip are so far the best on the net and one can easily make progress with the help of their Data sheet, Ref. Manual, Application Notes and numerous other resources.

 

Freescale generally make CISC and microchip do RISC.

When programming down at assembler level you will notice motorolla has BCD arithmetic, multiply, divide, fancy bit manipulation as the pics do not. The freescale products usually have more registers too where the basic pic has just it's working register.

Keep in mind i'm talking about the lower end of things eg HC08 vs PIC16.
Chips like dspic and pic32 would most probably have a much larger instruction set.

When we talk about 32 bit microcontrollers you'll see architectures such as MIPS, ARM and 68K. If you're programming in C it's all the same , but if you're programming in assembler, pick one that is more user friendly to you. Personally i find RISC annoying as a lot of simple functions are not built into the instruction set and generally have very few registers to play with.