[jwr]

One more thing to consider: if your time is limited and you have to design/build lots of different devices, stick to more extensive product lines. As an example the NXP Kinetis, while having its share of warts and issues, is a huge product line with hundreds of chips, sharing a similar architecture.

This means that you can use a chip that fits requirements well, ranging from tiny simple M0+ devices all the way to monster M4 chips with 1M flash and every peripheral one can imagine. They not only share some peripherals, but you use the same SDK, documentation formats are the same, etc.

This is a huge time saver and lets you use the right chip for each project, instead of sticking the same expensive microcontroller everywhere, or using ones from different manufacturers.

[jpm_sd]

I switched from STM32 to the Kinetis family two years ago and I've been super happy with the change. The free IDE is actually pretty solid and support has been adequate. Now that Freescale has been doubly gobbled up (first by NXP and then NXP by Qualcomm) this may go downhill a bit, but the user forums are decent.

Edit: I'm also using an M4 with dual bank flash almost everywhere. The projects I'm doing these days aren't particularly BOM cost sensitive and the headroom + foolproof firmware updating are fantastic (as the article says).

[jwr]

Interesting -- could you write about your impressions? How do peripherals compare? I think you get 32-bit timers on the STM32? And I heard that most other peripherals are newer/better than the 8-bit peripherals that NXP/Freescale adapts to the Kinetis chips -- what do you think?

[jpm_sd]

I guess I just haven't needed those bells and whistles. 32 bit timers are kinda huge. And some of the peripherals on the STM are suffering from "newer ain't always better" - the CAN and I2C controllers are more complicated than they need to be, IMHO.

Edit: I can't make any useful comparison on analog peripherals since I use external ADCs, DACs, etc. more or less 100% of the time

[jwr]

Thanks, this reply is much appreciated.