gnupic: fate of 18F0x0 chips?
Subject:
Re: fate of 18F0x0 chips?
From:
"Mark J. Dulcey" ####@####.####
Date:
20 Mar 2002 18:17:53 -0000
Message-Id: <3C98D0A4.3090202@buttery.org>
John Rehwinkel wrote:
> That reminds me -- Microchip had announced a line of 40MHz 8-pin flash
> micros early last year:
>
> PIC18F010
> PIC18F012
> PIC18F020
> PIC18F022
>
> The said they'd be about a buck-and-a-half apiece, and would be
> sampling in June with quantity production in August. I downloaded
> the reference manuals and eagerly anticipated getting my hands on
> some. Toward the end of the year, I hadn't heard anything, and
> emailing Microchip (the "read by a human" address) yielded nothing.
> Now references to these parts seem to have vanished from the website.
>
> I figure they were never brought to market, but I still wonder why.
A site search found only two mentions: in the "Automotive E-Pack" and
the "Flash E-Pack". But those were just dead links to the info pages on
the chips.
As for the cause of the disappearance, it beats me; I would have liked
to use them. Perhaps their big customers didn't show any interest. Those
little 8-pin guys go into stuff that isn't going to get reprogrammed in
the field, which is the only reason any of the big boys would ever buy
flash-based PICs. (If you're only programming them once, OTP chips are
fine, and they probably have them programmed for them by Microchip or
some other outside company anyway.) They don't care about the nuisance
of erasing and programming the EPROM-based chips; unlike us hobbyists,
they have the budget for that hardware.
> Also: are there any flash-based chips with internal oscillators?
Yes: the 16F627 and 16F628, which I mentioned in the previous message.
That's how you get 16 I/O pins from an 18-pin device; you can reprogram
the pins normally used for the crystal or external clock to be
general-purpose I/O pins. And at under $2.50 each, they're cheap. Not as
small as the 18F0xx series would have been, though.
