Re: Moving from 8051 to AVR

On Thursday, in article <dsfukh$m80$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
ruffrecords@xxxxxxxxx "Ian Bell" wrote:

John Devereux wrote:

Ian Bell <ruffrecords@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
I agree there is certainly a class of high volume applications that are
using high level languages. I was involved in a set top box development -
it used linux and a bunch of standard libs so there was not a huge amount
of code to write and only a few programmers were needed. I have also been
involved in mobile phone development and I can tell you that most of the
complexity is in the silicon (including much of the protocol stack) and
pretty much the only C code written is for the user interface. Even this is
disappearing with the advent of java. That said, I am certain there are
other high vol apps that do use lots of high level code.

And these are the
applications that have large teams of programmers thrown at
them. Things like talking greeting cards, digital watches, kitchen
appliances must surely only employ a minority of programmers.


There's a whole bunch of other stuff in between like DVD players, printers,

Depending on the DVD player it may or may not use a 32bit processor anyway
or it may be using chippery to do all the conversions.

Printers fall into two camps real printers and spawn of the devil!

Real printers have the processing inside the printer itself, more often
than not a 32 bit processor and with an option of network interface, it
is highly likely that to support things like Postscript and networking
they use high level languages and an OS.

Spawn of the devil printers use the host to do all the processing and other
popup and web access applications, using a high level language normally on the
host.

Also with printers there is a lot of reuse as the differences between model
A, A1, A2, B3, quirkyname 3000 and sillyname 5000, are mainly branding,
styling and minor changes in performance.

keyboards, alarm systems and so on. Like you I don't really know. I'm going
to do some googling to see if there are any stats out there.

Keyboards are very much minimal code and power optimisations. Depending on
the complexity (and volume) of the alarm system will mean that the vast
majority are probably written in assembly on the cheapest and smallest
possible micro.

--
Paul Carpenter | paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<http://www.pcserviceselectronics.co.uk/> PC Services
<http://www.gnuh8.org.uk/> GNU H8 & mailing list info
<http://www.badweb.org.uk/> For those web sites you hate

.