Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Microchip doesn't (officially) tell you about the VSC8512

serd.es

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 103 posts

Re: What Microchip doesn't (officially) tell you about the VSC8512

#31

Post by lmz »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #22
gregfjohnson wrote: post #10

On the topic of Microchip and secrecy: I downloaded and installed their IDE, MPLAB X IDE v6.20. It is for a pic3mx chip. The compiler looks like a completely generic gcc, built to cross-compile on a Windows host. However, they want a $1000.00 “licensing fee” in order to enable any optimization level above -O0. This seems wrong. Wouldn’t this be a violation of the copyleft license covering gcc? I’m guessing there’s so…

The GPL in no way forbids that. However, if they are obeying GPL you can ask them for the source code and then remove that limit yourself. If you ask for the source and they don't give it to you, then alert GNU.

Of course that depends if the optimization was compiled into the version they have. One can imagine two binaries with the optimizations just missing from the free one.

Re: What Microchip doesn't (officially) tell you about the VSC8512

#32

Post by ants_everywhere »

ACCount36 wrote: post #26
junon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microchip in particular is very bad at developer experience and tooling. The only vendor I actually enjoy working with to any degree is ST, and only design boards using their uC's for that reason. I've heard good things about Nordic, though. Might try them out at some point. Microchip's own IDE and project generator spit out a hello world project that didn't even compile. NXP wouldn't even let me download their tooli…

True, and Microchip is still good when compared to the likes of Broadcom and Qualcomm.

I don't do embedded work, but I see Broadcom and Qualcomm show up a lot in Linux bugs.

I'd love to hear stories of what it's like to work with chips from these companies.

Re: What Microchip doesn't (officially) tell you about the VSC8512

#33

Post by 0xTJ »

I wish that Microchip would officially publish the programming algorithms and EE bit maps for the Atmel ATF16V8, ATF22V10 SPLDs and ATF15xx CPLDs. They programming algos have been mostly reverse-engineered (or otherwise figured out), but it'd be nice to have those published in the open, and I don't think the ATF15xx maps are completely known.

The ATF15xx have BSDL files released, but that's only for testing/bypass.

Re: What Microchip doesn't (officially) tell you about the VSC8512

#34

Post by Gracana »

junon wrote: post #25
ACCount36 wrote: post #24

The thing I loathe the most about embedded work is dealing with silicon vendors and their boneheaded refusal to publish the fucking documentation and tooling.

Microchip in particular is very bad at developer experience and tooling. The only vendor I actually enjoy working with to any degree is ST, and only design boards using their uC's for that reason. I've heard good things about Nordic, though. Might try them out at some point. Microchip's own IDE and project generator spit out a hello world project that didn't even compile. NXP wouldn't even let me download their tooli…

I was on the Microchip bandwagon until the PIC32. Little MIPS MCUs with onboard RAM and graphics, awesome! ...except they came with an errata that listed huge problems with every interesting peripheral, and it didn't improve for ages. They may still suck, I don't know.

A while back I tried out Espressif's esp32 and I was impressed by what they were offering. Their devices seem to be well documented and the esp-idf framework is really pleasant to use. It's much easier to work with than STM32Cube and ST's sprawling documentation.

Re: What Microchip doesn't (officially) tell you about the VSC8512

#35

Post by traverseda »

ACCount36 wrote: post #24

The thing I loathe the most about embedded work is dealing with silicon vendors and their boneheaded refusal to publish the fucking documentation and tooling.

Why though? This is clearly a problem I just don't understand what the vendors are getting out of it.

Re: What Microchip doesn't (officially) tell you about the VSC8512

#36

Post by dgfitz »

traverseda wrote: post #35
ACCount36 wrote: post #24

The thing I loathe the most about embedded work is dealing with silicon vendors and their boneheaded refusal to publish the fucking documentation and tooling.

Why though? This is clearly a problem I just don't understand what the vendors are getting out of it.

I think the short answer is because manufacturers don’t care.

Re: What Microchip doesn't (officially) tell you about the VSC8512

#37

Post by jmiskovic »

stephen_g wrote: post #19
gregfjohnson wrote: post #10

On the topic of Microchip and secrecy: I downloaded and installed their IDE, MPLAB X IDE v6.20. It is for a pic3mx chip. The compiler looks like a completely generic gcc, built to cross-compile on a Windows host. However, they want a $1000.00 “licensing fee” in order to enable any optimization level above -O0. This seems wrong. Wouldn’t this be a violation of the copyleft license covering gcc? I’m guessing there’s so…

Yeah I’m really not a fan - we had some designs with PICs on them and ended up switching to NXP micros (MCX-A and i.MX-RT) instead, partly because of MPLAB and also because the Microchip ones had some annoying quirks. NXP’s documentation I find a lot better too. I literally try to avoid Microchip where I can from the experience…

Personally I hated the NXP's docs for the ARM M4 core. Bunch of dry tables listing each register in details, lacking the juicy diagrams and descriptions on how the bits integrate to work as a subsystem. I constantly needed to cross-reference 3+ documents (most of which describe the whole family and not the specific IC). Their HALs and code samples were obviously written by students/interns.

I liked working with Microchip uC, but this was back when the whole IC (PIC24) was described in a single ~1000 page document. I found it very readable and instructive in general.

If I had to pick something today it would be with RP2040/2350. The docs look awesome and there's a huge community that is not locked down in some corporate moderated forum but spread organically, with actually useful GitHub projects. It is the only embedded product where it felt like the open source community is along for the ride and not just picking up the scraps. I hope they continue this line of products.

Re: What Microchip doesn't (officially) tell you about the VSC8512

#38

Post by rkangel »

lmz wrote: post #31
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPL in no way forbids that. However, if they are obeying GPL you can ask them for the source code and then remove that limit yourself. If you ask for the source and they don't give it to you, then alert GNU.

Of course that depends if the optimization was compiled into the version they have. One can imagine two binaries with the optimizations just missing from the free one.

If they distribute the one with optimisations, then they need to make the source available.

Re: What Microchip doesn't (officially) tell you about the VSC8512

#39

Post by ACCount36 »

traverseda wrote: post #35
ACCount36 wrote: post #24

The thing I loathe the most about embedded work is dealing with silicon vendors and their boneheaded refusal to publish the fucking documentation and tooling.

Why though? This is clearly a problem I just don't understand what the vendors are getting out of it.

Perhaps they think that by forcing everyone to go through the sales dept just to get the basic docs, they'll get better sales opportunities.

How do you upsell a hardware engineer who just wants to buy a specific chip, and already has everything to evaluate and use it? You don't. So you force everyone to go through sales, and then sales wants to talk to non-engineering higher-ups, and then the upsell happens - while the people who actually knew what they wanted remain as far away as possible.

And if you don't have the pockets deep enough for the sales dept to acknowledge your existence, then you might as well not exist.

Re: What Microchip doesn't (officially) tell you about the VSC8512

#40

Post by mannyv »

lttlrck wrote: post #9

Token ring was old in 1996 when my masters thesis focused on error handling behavior and simulation thereof. I wonder if there are certain elements in certain "industrial complexes" that need to maintain or interface with legacy TR systems and that's why it's still hanging around in "dark silicon".

The ideas behind token ring underlies DOCIS.

While not technically TR, it does use a token that moves from device to device.

It would be interesting to know if TR is better at contention management than broadcast ethernet - which nobody does anymore because everyone uses switches.

Post reply on HN