ORIGINAL: krimo
I haven't tried the Atmel AVR yet. Is there a "low-cost" evaluation/development kit offered/available that has an included compiler/assembler. And, if you want to upgrade the compiler that comes with the eval/dev kit is it expensive?
Currently I'm looking for a microcontroller that has lots (~40) GPIO lines and can produce pulse widths approaching (1/32.768MHz) or 30.5175 ns with an included 32-bit data bus. Unfortunately, I think I'm going to be forced to use an FPGA to make this happen because the high end microcontrollers have a feature set that seemingly is not oriented for control but for multimedia and internet applications and the compilers that support the high end devices are expensive.
I've also heard at a seminar that you don't want to use Assembly with ARM microcontrollers unless you're an expert.
Last time I used it (about a year ago) all the tools you needed were free from Atmel. But, the timer-hardware PWM outputs are limited, the most servos I could ever control with a single chip was 2. I've made 2-channel car controllers with it but not much else.
An ARM is probably what you need, there are ARMs avaliable that have many PWM outputs I am told. Assembly language, yeah, it's pretty bad on an ARM, but this day and age, there are few cases where you need to touch that.