Re: Moving from 8051 to AVR


Thanks for the detail, here. That's not quite what I was thinking
about, when I remarked they weren't in the business of selling CPUs.
What you've added, though, doesn't really correct my comment. They
are in the business, from what you say, in selling a highly integrated
set of functions. That's not the same thing. It would be not so
unlike claiming that selling a South Bridge ASIC for the Intel family
was competing with a PC compatible UART from some other manufacturer,
simply because this particular South Bridge ASIC happens to include a
PC compatible UART function in it. Certainly, few would consider the
vendor of the ASIC as competing in the business of selling UARTs.


Except National Semiconductor which had the patent on
some of the key functionality of that specific UART.

It doesn't change my central thought, either. Was there a complete
misunderstanding of expectations by these two companies? If so, what
does that say of top management at both that a meeting of the minds
was so fundamentally flawed? If not, if Ericsson understand some of
what they may have been doing, why wouldn't Ericsson have chosen one
of so many other less expensive and better options available to them?


I take it that there aren't public details to be found, here. If you
know of any, I'd enjoy reading them.


Can't discuss internal Atmel business here, but there are some open sources
of info.

As far as I understand, (and I repeat, I was not employed by Atmel at the
time)
They evaluated the market, ended up with the ARM and the AVR on the short
list
and selected the best technical solution for their needs, which was the AVR.
This was so long time ago that I think any NDAs have expired

There was 5 major decision criteria and the AVR fullfilled all, with the
best power consumption.
I think all "less expensive and better options" you mention would fall on
certain requirements for support (compiler and OS).

I was proposing the CompactRISC CR16 to them at the time, but National
architecture group adamantly refused to support more than 2 MB addressing
space
and it had slightly higher power consumption than the AVR. It also uses more
code.
The 5 requirements from Ericsson was known by National for about two years.
I managed to make NSC do a verilog synthesizable CR16 core
(and convinced National to make ARM to do the ARM7TDMI-S in the process),
fixed the right compiler, failed to convince NSC to port the right O/S.
In the end, the lack of addressing space killed all prospects.
The CR32 (which has not been released in any product) would have
been able to solve the problem, but at a higher power consumption
Once the "official" project was started National was prepared to do
everything Ericsson required.
Only problem was that Ericsson wanted to have everything ready two months
after
the start of the "official" project.
(NSC managed to say *no* to Nokia TWICE when Nokia wanted National to do
the baseband controller for the Nokia GSM phone)

The "court" has obviously decided that the license terms was violated
otherwise no penalty would be awarded.

42 M$ might sound expensive, but an ARM core is not for free either.
I think Sony-Ericsson which is but one of the buyers of the Ericsson ASICs
sold 30 - 40 M phones last year.
My guess is that licensing the ARM would have cost them similar amounts.


Jon

--
Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
ulf@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
This message is intended to be my own personal view and it
may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB


.

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