Posts Tagged ‘development costs’

Hardware costs versus development costs

Thursday, December 24th, 2009 Nigel Jones

Earlier this year I posted about how to solve the problem of PIC stack overflow. As part of that article I asked the question as to why does anybody use a PIC anyway when there are superior architectures such as the AVR available? Well, various people have linked to the posting and so I get a regular stream of visitors to it, some of whom weigh in on the topic. The other day, one visitor offered as a reason for using the PIC the fact that they are cheap. Is this the case I asked myself? So I did some rough comparisons of the AVR & 8 bit PIC processors – and sure enough PIC processors are cheaper to buy. For example comparing the ATmega168P vs the PIC16F1936 (two roughly equivalent processors – the AVR has more memory and a lot more throughput, the PIC has more peripherals) I found that Digikey was selling the AVR for 2.60 per 980 and the PIC for $1.66 per 1600. A considerable difference – or is it?

Most of the products I work on have sales volumes of 1000 pieces a year, with a product life of 5 years. Thus if I chose the AVR for such a product, then my client would be paying approximately $1000 a year more for say 5 years. Applying a very modest 5% discount rate, this translates to a Net Present Value of $4,329.

This is when it gets interesting. Does the AVR’s architecture allow a programmer to be more productive? Well, clearly this is a somewhat subjective manner. However my sense is that the AVR does indeed allow greater programmer productivity. The reasons are as follows:

  1. The AVR’s architecture lends itself by design to being coded in a HLL. The PIC does not. As a result, programming the PIC in a HLL is always a challenge and one is far more likely to have to resort to assembly language – with the attendant drop in productivity.
  2. The AVR’s inherent higher processing speed means that one has to be less concerned with fine tuning code in order to get the job done. Fine tuning code can be very time consuming.
  3. The AVR’s greater code density means that one is less likely to be concerned with making the application fit in the available memory (something that can be extremely time consuming when things gets tight).
  4. The AVR’s superior interrupt structure means that interrupt handling is far easier. Again interrupts are something that can consume inordinate amounts of time when things aren’t working.

Now if one is a skilled PIC programmer and a novice on the AVR, then your experience will probably offset what I have postulated are inherent inefficiencies in the PIC architecture. However what about someone such as myself who is equally comfortable in both arenas? In this case the question becomes – how many more days will it take to code up the PIC versus the AVR and what do those days cost?

Of course if you are a salaried employee, then your salary is ‘hidden’. However when you are a consultant the cost of extra days is clearly visible to the client. In this case, if using an AVR reduces the number of development days by even a few, the cost difference between the two processors rapidly dwindles to nothing. Thus the bottom line is – I’m not sure that PICs are cheaper. However I suspect that in many organizations what counts is the BOM cost of a product – and perhaps this finally explains why PIC’s are more popular than AVR’s.

As always, I’m interested in your thoughts.
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