ATMEL SAMC21 - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: BocaDev
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2018, 06:13:54 pm
content: HelloI have been tasked to update a product that has an 8051 and discovered the ATMEL SAMC21, mainly because of it's 5V operating capability to be a good drop-in with little changes to the existing hardware.I have been looking into this microcontroller, however I'm not sure about the acquisition by Microchip. So I was wondering if anyone may have some guidance in this area? I don't want to begin my processor update project and then find out it's going EOL a year later or so.As for the software, I have seen other post about the Atmel Studio 7 not being a good development tool and has seen many issues. Should I stay clear of using these tools? Will Microchip kill-off AS7?I've noticed others having a liking to the MSP430 devices and wondering how these devices are to work with?Thanks for all the help, choosing a micro can be a daunting task.

author: JPortici
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2018, 07:08:30 pm
content: No reason why it should be EOL'd anytime soon.Infact, new ATSAM products have been released after the acquisition.

author: jnz
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2018, 07:19:39 pm
content: I wouldn't worry about EOL... but I can tell you I just went down the road with C21 and E51 and I walked away.If you want to use Atmel Studio and their HAL, it won't be that hard, or give you clean efficient code. If you want to use anyone one else's tools or IDE, pretty much no go. I definitely did not find a lot of support for the Atmel parts. Their weakness is their software drivers, and because Microchip has the same issue, I'm not sure I see it changing soon.

author: floobydust
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2018, 09:52:04 pm
content: I would use the part, Microchip hasn't completely ruined Atmel's products.There are very few 5V I/O ARM MCU's. The automotive industry uses 5V exclusively.ARM parts such asNXP S32 Automotiveare trying to dethrone the Power PC. NXP/Freescale Kinetis KE02, KE06 as well.

author: JPortici
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2018, 07:33:03 am
content: Quote from: floobydust on August 17, 2018, 09:52:04 pmQuotefor I/O between sensors and ECU.Quoteof course, those power cores (MPC5/SPC5) are approaching the end of the longevity program. And complexity/performance of chips and requirements have increased so much in so little time.do you have any information that they will have 5V IO/s?Anyway, i had some time with the C21, i tried i think three different MCUs and in the end settled with a PIC32MX for that project.It took little time to understand the logic behind ASF. Datasheet was harder to understand than expected and it lacked a lot of information that may have been declared "obvious".after a quick dive inside the various library files i was able to understand how the registers were actually named and that was it, no more ASF for me.Or, if you still want to use a library, user ataradov has written a lightweight library for ATSAM and other ATMEL products (you can find it on his github). Altough not very hard to understand, for some things ASF was really convoluted, his library helped me understand better the inners of some peripherals.the CAN controller in the C21 is okay, i guess. I had no major problems in configuring it and it worked okay in all the tests before requirements changed and i changed MCU as well

author: Lajon
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2018, 07:57:36 am
content: Quote from: BocaDev on August 17, 2018, 06:13:54 pmPeople who have problems are likely to post about this but for the record I have no issues with recent versions of Atmel Studio 7 (this includes developing for the SAMC21 btw).Also I have no problem with using ASF (ver 3), e.g., it's useful to run examples and look at register settings in the debugger. 91 example projects for SAMC21 currently./Lars

author: lucazader
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 20, 2018, 02:59:38 am
content: Does the micro need to be run at 5V?There are a few ARM vendors (like ST) that have ARM parts that have 5v tolerant IO. Eg they accept incoming 5v signals just fine. You would of course have to check the data sheets of the chips you are interfacing with to see if they would work fine with the 3v3 that the ARM chips would produce.If this is possible it would open your options up even more.

author: JPortici
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 20, 2018, 10:50:36 am
content: yeeeah but 5V tolerant input doesn't mean 5V outputs, or 5V capable ADC anyway

author: jnz
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 20, 2018, 04:51:34 pm
content: Quote from: Lajon on August 18, 2018, 07:57:36 amAnd that's great if you're using a chip "old enough" (the C21 is pretty new) to still have been supported for ASF3.But all new chips (E-series for example) have no ASF3 libs. They old have ASF4. Which means if you're starting today you're training yourself to use something that likely won't be an option for your next project if you want to stay with the same mfg.

author: westfw
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 20, 2018, 06:10:56 pm
content: What? ASF4 might go the same way as ASF3 and libsam? Inconceivable!

author: technix
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 21, 2018, 10:05:58 pm
content: If you are willing to risk using Chinese chips, there is a GD32F190 series which is supposed to be similar to STM32F1 while running on 5V.