Re: PIC vs AVR vs ARM

Ulf Samuelsson wrote:



LMI make Cortex chips which are incompatible with most of the others.
Apparently they are financed by ARM themselves.
I guess that is one reason why the uptake is not dramatic.


Hi Ulf,

You might have been seriously misinformed :-)
LMI is not financed by ARM. We are two different companies, and LMI
is a ARM partner.

The definition of incompatible is a bit unclear.
Same as any Cortex-M3 chips, the LuminaryMicro Cortex-M3 chips are not binary compatible with traditional ARM processors. The Thumb instructions is the same (except BLX and SETEND instructions). But startup code, interrupt handlers and system control codes (e.g. mode switching) will have to be rewritten.

However, application codes developed for LuminaryMicro parts will work on any other Cortex-M3 parts (of course some code might need to be changed if the peripherals / memory map are different).

regards,
Joseph
.