baranikumarhtsl 
Can anybody give me simple small basic differences between AVR and PIC....?
During my college days i heard lot of things about PIC controllers . I mean Whereever i turn i hear the word PIC and somebody talks about PIC Projects.
Is PIC is the series of uC provided by Atmel like Tiny AVR, Mega AVR series of uC's..?
Thanks in advance
Can anybody give me simple small basic differences between AVR and PIC....?
The Internet can.
Type "PIC vs AVR" into Google and spend many hours looking yourself.
AVR = www.atmel.com
PIC = www.microchip.com
Is this the only site you can access?
Most of your posts seem to be fishing for someone else to supply information that you could easily come by if you looked, by doing the looking for yourself you learn more than someone telling you the answer up front.
Intelligence is not knowing the answer it's knowing how to find the answer.
Guillem Planisi 
processor wars, round 783105483611358.
PIC != AVR != 8051 != H08 != ARM
A lot of things to learn. Google is your friend.
Guillem.
microcarl 
Intelligence is not knowing the answer, it's knowing how to find the answer.
Dave,
Very well put...
BenG 
Intelligence is not knowing the answer, it's knowing how to find the answer.
Some people would say it's not about answers at all - but Intelligence is about knowing what questions to ask.
Not me though - I can always think of questions - shame I can't always find answers :-)
bobgardner There was a guy with a Comp Sci degree at the simulation outfit I worked and he sort of couldnt understand why you couldnt just run the 68000 binary on the VAX. To a programmer, I guess a fortran program was a fortran program and once it disappeared inside the compiler, magic happened and the lights on the trainer started flashing. Somehow he managed to coast thru 4 years of not understanding how different computers have different numbers and sizes of registers and different instructions and assembly languages, and are made by different semiconductor companies? Now I have rather detailed knowledge of lots of 20 year old microprocessors and their various instructions sets... how can I leverage that into a money making venture? Maybe the project managers in Bangalore need an embedded programmer with deep enough experience to identify several microcontroller manufacturers?
I'm seeing more and more people who I wonder just how they got their degree's and how they gotta job lacking the basics of programming let alone real-time embedded.
I wish I wasn't paid to carry them.
stevech mneary Not me though - I can always think of questions - shame I can't always find answers
trinity_parag Is PIC is the series of uC provided by Atmel like Tiny AVR, Mega AVR series of uC's..?
sp1nm0nkey AVR vs. PIC
AVRs are gasoline powered, and get about three clocks to the gallon of petrol. PICs are hand crank powered, and are thus more friendly to the environment. However, Atmel has made a press release about fuel cell powered AVRs that will release nothing but water back to the environment. Data sheets should be available soon.
AVRs are also drop in compatible with every CPU in existance. Ever. Just hammer it in.
'cmon everyone, help this guy out :)
stevech AVRs pick on PICs
PICs memory addressing architecture was badly PICed
I must give an explicit warning to noobs !
AVRs are RISC processors.
That means, you RISC to get never away from them
once you touched one !
danni AVRs are also drop in compatible with every CPU in existance. Ever. Just hammer it in.
No !
I have tons of applications, where the AVR was absolutely unable to replace the 8051.
Because:
- higher speed (100MIPS)
- four interrupt priorities
- integrated peripherals (e.g. Ethernet, MP3, USB, 20Bit-ADC, DAC)
- and so on
So I use the AVRs for small applications only.
Peter
sgomes 
Um Peter... I think he might have been joking..... The "Just hammer it in." probably should have given you a clue.
stevech I'm replacing my AMD 4200 with an AVR
If you hammer enough, you may even get
four AVRs into the socket !
QUAD-CPU power ! Really cool !
Zathras 
Seriously, the Wikibooks article has a good (if verbose) writeup. In one breath, AVR has GCC, cheap dev tools, better code portability, and less design cruft. PICs are supposed to be better with ESD protection, their wider product line can give a closer design fit, and availability is more consistent.
More fundamentally, the only universal 8 bit design/ISA is 8051, everything else is proprietary/single vendor.
theusch 
PICs are supposed to be better with ESD protection,
their wider product line can give a closer design fit,
and availability is more consistent
Lee
From personal experience I do agree that PICs are better built than AVRs, exactly how; I have no idea. But I definitely had alot more dead AVRs than I did PICs.
If you are new to embedded design, then PICs would be a great place to start. As your appetite for power grows along with your knowledge, then AVRs will be the next best choice.
This is an AVR forum, so alot of people will defend the AVR and say that anything that is not AVR is just garbage. IMHO AVRs are just another 8 bit platform, a very good 8 bit platform that is fast enough and cheap enough that no one would say that you are dumb for choosing it. When I first started with PICs, everyone was telling me to use AVR.
Again as your appetite for power grows along with your knowledge then logically you would move to the ARM MCU. Right now ARM looks like it will eat up any competition you throw at it, I have no yet started learning them, but I bought my programmer and ICE for ARM a long time ago in anticipation that one day I will need to learn it quickly to keep up, but that day has not come up yet, so I live in bliss for now in my AVR world.
AVR is like a honda civic, great value, good features, you learn to live with its faults.
As a newbie the biggest concern you should have is that PICs while an older and slower architecture, has much more refined tools, both hardware and software wise. But AVRs have come a long way in terms of ease of use and reducing the cost of ownership for the tools. the development of AVR GCC really has carried AVR to new heights in the last 2 years, however as great as AVR GCC will ever be it can still not match up with the free C compiler that PIC gives away for many of their chips. I only say this because Microchip carries the burden of supporting their compiler, with AVR GCC who are you going to complain to?
AVR still has alot of room for refinement, but I find that it is a good sign, it is tell me that the architecture I am working with is still kind of fresh and is not old and stale.
sutton 
Due to the sweeping nature of the OP's question no concise answer will be produced. The only way he will get an indepth answer is to spend many happy hours with data sheets.
Edit
Suggest you have a look at the microchip website as you do not seem aware of the origin if the PIC.
danni But I definitely had alot more dead AVRs than I did PICs.
I have no single dead AVR until now.
But I see often such statements from such people, which use ISP programming over the LPT Port.
Some days ago my colleague gave me a "dead" called ATMega32.
After inserting on the STK500, I could return him the ATMega32 "alive".
So I'm interest, if there any AVR exist, which was still dead after high voltage programming.
Peter
Lotsa bullshit - not unusual.
One fact remains - in the midst of a completely saturated and mature market, the AVR appears and in a few years captures a significant portion of that market. It kicked Microchip in the nuts, and gave MotoFreeScalerola a head-butt.
You don't introduce a new microcontroller and have it succeed as has the AVR for any reason other than that it is superior. Even if it was close, folks wouldn't bother because they'ed have to learn a whole new tool set and trust an unknown vendor.
The main reason folks continued to use PICS was intertia, it was what they knew and had tools for.
The people who buy microcontrollers are not stupid - why would they buy an unknown processor designed by a couple of grad students from Norway to replace the existing stable of proven micros if it wasn't clearly superior?
I tried to stay out of this, but I'm begining to suspect we have another troll infestation.
Smiley
Gwen 
Difference btw AVR & PIC
All I have to say is that I would rather PAY to play with AVRs than BE PAID to work with PICs. :)
microcarl toalan wrote:But I definitely had alot more dead AVRs than I did PICs.
I have no single dead AVR until now.
But I see often such statements from such people, which use ISP programming over the LPT Port.
Peter
Over the past two to three years I have designed several projects using AVRs for my employer and, several for my self. I am always removing and instaling one flavor microcontroller or another in my STK500/501 and just haven't has any AVR failures - other then when I hit one of the I/O pins with 24 VDC. It turned out that I blew the "High-Side" output driver of the I/O pin. I was, in fact, able to solder a 4.7K Ohm pull-up resistor to the I/O pin and continued with the proto-type development programming without issue.
I have never had a reliability issue with the Motorola MC68HC11 either. I had one MC6800 microprocessor back in the 1980s that woulden't execute a particular instruction. I never has any reliability issues with the 6301, Z80, 2650, 8X300I, 6502, or any other microprocessor/microcontroller that I have used.
My point here is simply that, while there are likes and dislikes between features offered by the various microcontroller manufacturers, I don't think any of them are prone to failure, one more then another. I think the real issue is that, the design philosophies and practacies that the designer dictates directly affects the reliability of the end design a whole lot more then the microcontroller technology, itself.
Good design practacies will overcome most, if not all, of the majority of the piculuralities of the different microcontroller technologies.
I typically run my AVR designs at 16 MHz and sometimes even push the controller up to 20, 21, and even 24 MHz - just to see what I can get out of the thing. All of my AVR designs are done using a single sided PCB, using sound design rules that I learned back when I was doing a lot of work with Emitter Coupled Logic (ECL). These rules encompas good power routing, good bypassing, an understanding of transmission lines, where to place critical analog within the PCB layout, etc... I don't get strange glitches, intermittent failures, run-away controllers, noisy analog signals, etc... So, how about we just put the blame where it really belongs - on us, the designer.
Oh! And Smileymicros, I couldn't agree with you more about the level of quality, and the fact that the AVR is simply superior.
stevech To me, the AVR's memory addressing which does not need paging, and the more orthogonal instruction set, is why I moved away from the PIC. Put another way, the AVR is to the PIC as the old 68000 was to the 80386, where the latter was a mess due to segmented memory addressing.
True, PIC C compilers hide this somewhat, but there's still code being generated to bank switch and deal with the complexities of pointers whereas on an AVR a pointer is straightforward.
Maybe the newest PICs fixed all of this. I don't know. It would be a big change for them though.
For sure, PICs are high viz in the educational markets which is why you see a lot of chatting re them on the Internet.
How about adding a new forum: Too Frequently Asked
The PIC vs AVR's comparisons, compiler wars and other such posts could be moved there.
There will always be the clueless or renegades who have to ignore the specific location
and post in the regular forums, but those posts could easily be moved.
Stan
With regards to dead PICs vs Dead AVRs, I agree that most times the issue is that for some reason the fuses get messed up. However to me in many cases messed up fuses = chip dead, this is especially true for SMD type AVRs. To rescue that stuff I need to hook up all types of wires to get high voltage programming to work, which is just not worth it.
theusch
To rescue that stuff I need to hook up all types of wires to get high voltage programming to work, which is just not worth it.
For clock rescue, injecting a clock source into XTAL1 will almost always "rescue" the chip without dismounting anything.
(The flip side is that with a single AVR model and package, we can use it for >>many<< chips. A wide variety of clock sources can be used, and a wide supply voltage range. Contrast that with experiences in the Moto '05 days. Or TI MSP430 that don't allow 5V. Etc.)
Lee
I read that PIC's are actually AVR's with a built in hard-coded emulator for PIC opcodes, that's why they are so slow.
Oh, and some guy invented a light bulb that runs on water, but the Ford motor company had him wacked...
:) and Intel P4' are really parallel overclocked 6502'
microcarl Oh, and some guy invented a light bulb that runs on water, but the Ford motor company had him wacked...
Conspiracy theorist at... work :lol: :lol: :lol: :roll:
Both, not only totally unblievable but, extremely unlikely.
John, thanks for humor and a good laugh. :wink:
sutton Hydro electric power, now where did I leave that dam..
