Enhanced PIC chips in 12F and 16F range

[westaust55]

While many are eagerly awaiting the new PICAXE "X2" chips, I wonder if Rev Ed might also enhance the existing range with some of the new 12F and 16F PIC chips.

40% more M/C instructions,
claimed up to 40% speed improvement,
up to 32MHz internal oscillators,
up to 4kByte of data memory,

http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=2692&redirects=enhanced

 

[lbenson]

Good find. I couldn't locate any specific chip information. With rollout in "Q1 2009", it should be available soon. I would love to see 08X1s and 14X1s. The 14M in particular is very short on program space for its number of pins, if they are to be dealt with individually in all their versatile glory. And a built-in solution to "serin hang" would ease lots of problems.

 

[hippy]

Everything is possible and we do keep our eyes on what Microchip announces as its future intentions. Some quite interesting and significant changes seem to be on the horizon.

Some of the abilities of the higher-end PICmicros are being introduced into the lower and mid-range. Not entirely in a consistent manner it seems with respect to existing devices, and there does seem to be quite a difference emerging in what processors will support depending on which particular family tree they are in. That obviously then devolves down to needing to have source code even more complicated as it has to deal with different variants. All changes introduce more risk of mistakes creeping in and need thorough testing and it's rare that simple migration of using existing code on new processors and everything will run as expected but faster.

Raw speed improvements are always nice ( assuming stability and accuracy is within requirements ) but other performance gains are always harder to assess; if the 'faster mechanisms' cannot be used then there can be no gain from those.

The main criteria for introducing a new PICAXE variant are probable availability, price and having usable and compatible footprints with the existing range.

 

[Technical]

None of the chips announced so far are in 8 or 14 pin format, and the 18 pins devices announced (e.g. 16F1827) do not offer much extra to the PICAXE core apart from the increased internal resonator speed. What is required for 'X1' spec. is a device with much more internal program memory which these chips do not have - they are the same capacity as the existing 18X (4k).

But naturally we always look very carefully at suitability of all new chips - particularly if their cost is lower than existing parts!