Microcontrollers Roadmap

What is the best microcontroller and programming language?

Types of microcontrollers

As of 2008 there are several dozen microcontroller architectures and vendors including:

• Parallax Propeller
• Freescale 68HC11 (8-bit)
• Intel 8051
• Silicon Laboratories Pipelined 8051 Microcontrollers
• ARM processors (from many vendors) using ARM7 or Cortex-M3 cores are generally microcontrollers
• STMicroelectronics(8-bit), ST10 (16-bit) and STM32 (32-bit)
• Atmel AVR (8-bit), AVR32 (32-bit), and AT91SAM (32-bit)
• Freescale ColdFire (32-bit) and S08 (8-bit)
• Hitachi H8, Hitachi SuperH (32-bit)
• Infineon Microcontroller: 8, 16, 32 Bit microcontrollers for automotive and industrial applications<ref>www.infineon.com/mcu</ref>
• MIPS (32-bit PIC32)
• NEC V850 (32-bit)
• NXP Semiconductors LPC1000, LPC2000, LPC3000, LPC4000 (32-bit), LPC900, LPC700 (8-bit)
• Microchip PIC (8-bit PIC16, PIC18, 16-bit dsPIC33 / PIC24)
• PowerPC ISE
• PSoC (Programmable System-on-Chip)
• Rabbit 2000 (8-bit)
• Texas Instruments Microcontrollers  : TI MSP430 16-bit Microcontrollers
• Toshiba TLCS-870 (8-bit/16-bit)

and many others, some of which are used in very narrow range of applications or are more like applications processors than microcontrollers. The microcontroller market is extremely fragmented, with numerous vendors, technologies, and markets. Note that many vendors sell (or have sold) multiple architectures.