How We See Embedded Processing

At the risk of revealing my age, I will tell you that by the time I was in my fourth year of high school back in Italy, some of the first Intel microprocessors (the glorious 8080) and their early development boards were an extremely rare and exotic commodity that was affordable to very few educational institutions. Luckily for me, the principal of the "Alessandro Volta" technical high school was a rare visionary and purchased an MMD1 development board. I'm not sure exactly what he had to pay to get it, we talked about millions … of Lira (thousands of US dollars), but I remember vividly how he had me "volunteering" in the school library for an entire summer in order to earn an opportunity to touch that precious toy.

Fast forward five years—I was at the University of Trieste developing my master's thesis on parallel processing. There, I had a chance to put my hands on a brand-new development board for the very early INMOS Transputers—think 32-bit parallel processing machines. The tool's cost (including four processors) was down to several hundreds of dollars, but the tool's performance was such that I could perform image-processing algorithms using a linear image sensor in a textile industrial application—in real time! Still, if it was not for the university funds, as a student, I would never have been able to afford it.

Fast forward several more years and here I am, working for Microchip Technology in Chandler, Arizona. I've now worked for more than 15 years in the embedded-control industry, both as a designer for various companies using a variety of architectures and as an applications engineer for Microchip. I've seen the capabilities of 8-bit microcontrollers grow immensely; and in parallel I've seen their applications expand and become so pervasive. It's this personal experience that tells me that a key to the great success of 8-bit microcontrollers lies in their increasing affordability and the affordability of their development tools (now in the range of tens of dollars). It's a simple equation: more engineers can play with the development boards, so more products are being incorporated into future designs.

Many here at Microchip share this vision. For this reason, although it is somewhat rare in the industry, we are proud to design and manufacture all our development tools internally, both hardware and software—though third parties also support our products. We also measure their sales numbers and proudly announce each milestone to our investors; it's a tradition at Microchip.

Please stay tuned for my first topical post, on the cost of development boards.