When we just started in the world of microcontrollers perhaps many of us ask ourselves some occasion, which is better? Atmel (AVR) or Microchip (PIC)? It seems that this question was passing from generation to generation.
While it is true that the PIC community is the largest in the world we can not ensure that its technology is really better than any other microcontroller, it is necessary to investigate a little more about the characteristics of each of them before issuing an opinion.
So this post tries to present the main differences that the AVR microcontrollers and the PIC have in a general way, it should be noted that thanks to the union of these companies are currently in production new models of microcontrollers with both technologies.
Price quality.
This is an important point, because although it is true that sometimes the quality costs, sometimes it is not like that and this is the case, the microcontrollers currently cheaper in the world are those of Microchip, that is because their community of users it is the largest of all and this is why its PIC microcontrollers can is offer them at a low price.
Electrical interference.
Perhaps this is one of the characteristics that we must take care of the most when choosing a microcontroller model because sometimes it is necessary to develop a control circuit for inductive loads, these are special cases because in most cases any microcontroller model tends to be reset by the electrical interference that is created when the load is energized.
If we had to put the same inductive load controlled by two similar circuits, one made with an AVR microcontroller and another with a PIC microcontroller we could tell that if the load is too large both would reset, but if we look which has a greater resistance to this type of issues, we would end up selecting the circuit made with an AVR microcontroller.
Speed.
When it comes to creating control or monitoring circuits, most of the time this factor is very important. For example, in a line follower robot, the most important thing is its PID control. However, in order for this to be possible, it is necessary that your response be fast according to what your sensors detect, that is why the higher the speed we have, the better. In this aspect PIC is far below AVR because the latter in most cases has a speed 4 times greater than that of a PIC, even when both have a crystal of the same speed. The above is due to the fact that the Atmel architecture can execute one instruction per cycle, the same as Microchip does with the PIC but in 4 cycles.
Community.
This is an important aspect when selecting a model in microcontroller space, because depending on the size of your community, it will depend the amount of information, tutorials, codes and resources that we can find for our future projects, that is why at this point Microchip wins again because its community is the largest in the world in terms of microcontrollers.
In general both AVR and PIC, are a good choice when needing a microcontroller, however AVR are highly recommended for applications of semi-industrial type where they will be exposed to large interference that although a PIC could do the same job it is better to take into account the advantages and disadvantages of each one and thus select the one that works best for us, because just as an AVR is recommended for semi-industrial projects, PIC is highly recommended for commercial applications (commercialization) due to its low cost.