EEPROJ Selecting Common MCUs for Our Projects

While we have plenty of experience with some "historic" MCU architectures and families (from hardcore PIC programmed in Assembly to outdated Parallax MCUs interpreting BASIC to fashionable but wasteful and childish Arduino, and many other ones in between), we have decided to standardize on the ARM Cortex architecture running old-fashion compiled embedded C language.

We believe that ARM MCU architecture is the future. Side note: we believe claims that some Chinese new fashionable architecture is an "ARM killer" are all more than premature at this point. We are quite set on this choice after careful considerations and evaluations.

Specifically within ARM, we like the distinction between M (embedded), A (application), and R (real-time), although R cores will very likely be fully absorbed into M or A cores as time goes on.

We see the craziness of everyone going for SoC cores with Application cores/processors and WiFi, Ethernet, etc cores or modules attached. As will be discussed elsewhere, we do not like wireless, WiFi, Bluetooth, IoT, Ethernet, and related craziness for emissions, safety, health, and MCU-overloading concerns. Unless there is a reason to do otherwise, none of our projects will require, contain, or even support wireless, WiFi, Bluetooth, IoT, or Ethernet.

Within the ARM category, we specifically choose the Cortex M4F family for lightweight projects, Cortex M7 for more advanced projects, and heterogeneous solutions using either an M4F or an M7 core in a multi-core or SoC solution.

Due to who currently offers M7 MCUs, we chose to settle on just Microchip Technology and STMicroelectronics offerings, with NXP penciled in as a stand-by for reserve.