ARM or PIC, need help

I have a major project coming up and I need to choose a microcontroller.

My choices are PIC and ARM. Which one is best with the below requirements?

- I need to worry about power management, it is battery powered.

- Size is also key, since it will be a rather small circuit board in both footprint and height.

- It will control up to 3 solenoids, LEDs, take a reading from a sensor or two.

Thanks in advance.

Latch

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Tags: design, pic, arm, preliminary, fab, micocontroller

robotonics

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1. Feb 3, 2012 12:46 PM (in response to Latch)
Re: ARM or PIC, need help

Hi

Personaly I would use a PIC for this project. The main reason for migrating from a PIC micro to say a Cortex-3 ARM micro would be that you needed the more complex features that an Advanced Risc Microcontroller offers, along with a higher performance ( Cortex-3 processor can run at 1.25DMIPS/MHZ ).

Other considerations would be the fact you can program an ARM entirely in C, including exception handling, reset, and initialisation.

However, your project appears to relatively simple, requiring upto maybe 8 I/O pins? A-D conversion on one or two channels?

There are a lot of small SMT PIC's that you could use, even some Extreme Low Power versions, and they are a lot less complex to program!

As I said, just my opinion, and I look forward to reading others!

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ken.havens

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2. Feb 3, 2012 1:43 PM (in response to Latch)
Re: ARM or PIC, need help

Hi Latch,
Keep in mind I am bias on this subject

A low power ARM option would be a ARM Cortex-M0-based device. There are several manufactures out there but NXP's LPC1100 pops to mind as it is available in a small 5x5 HVQFN33 package. Datasheet at http://ics.nxp.com/products/lpc1000/datasheet/lpc1110.lpc1111.lpc1112.lpc1113.lpc1114.pdf

We have a nice development board for the LPC1114FBD48/301,1 LPC1114FBD48/301,1 in that family at ...
http://www.keil.com/mcb1000/

Thanks,
Ken

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robotonics

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3. Feb 3, 2012 2:46 PM (in response to Latch)
Re: ARM or PIC, need help

Thanks for the link, having looked at the specs for the LPC1100, I might choose it over a pic.

I guess it might come down to ease of use, and the availability of hardware.

I am biased towards using a PIC as I have experience with them, I also have the neccessary programming and debugging hardware etc.

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JimW

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4. Feb 3, 2012 5:00 PM (in response to robotonics)
Re: ARM or PIC, need help

you need to provide more information...

do you have any knowledge of either MCU family?
do you have any purchased tools for either MCU family?
will you be using PWM?
can the MCU be put in sleep mode or do the signals require constant monitor?
Are you going to be using CAD tools or will it be a prototype board?
what power supplies will be available for MCU usage, 2v8, 3v, 3v3, 5v?

ST ARM have some of the best deep sleep power consumption figures in the CORTEX family.

PIC's have the ultra low power family which provides great deep sleep power consumption performace.

there is also the TI MSP430 MSP430 family for great low power consumption.

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Latch

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5. Feb 8, 2012 9:57 PM (in response to JimW)
Re: ARM or PIC, need help

Thanks for all the replies.

I have no choice but to use ARM it seems. Currently I am working on a software simulation of one processor. Looks like I took the plunge neck deep into ARM.

The LPC11xx series looks very useful. I am going to study it for sure.

Latch

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edmund

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6. Feb 8, 2012 11:19 PM (in response to Latch)
Re: ARM or PIC, need help

HI Latch,

how about using Renesas 16 bit RL78 MCU having 1.27DMIPS/MHz and having +/-1% accuracy of its High Speed Internal oscillator. It also has the low power snooze mode functionality.

http://sg.renesas.com/products/mpumcu/rl78/index.jsp

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