MSP430 vs Silicon Labs efm32

[bluehash 1,581]

I am a bit concerned with EMF32 being so young. What if the MCUs begin burning one by one in a couple of years, especially under extreme allowed temperature conditions? Would you expect them to be as reliable as MSP430? 

You mean heat up and catch fire? Rest assured that is not going to happen unless something went wrong electrically on the board. Although new, both are proven silicon... and ready to be used in mass produced devices.

For specialty equipment for extreme temperatures and environment, there is whole science behind it to make a good product.

[bluehash 1,581]

Also.. just to add, since it looks like you are pretty new, such chips have errata sheets which let you know of silicon bugs and workarounds if any. Stellaris had a ton of bugs and workarounds, but they revamped the full line to Tiva-C. 

[abc 5]

I meant to say "burn out", not "burn". As in, a pin burning out. Also, I am wondering about which chip is more vulnerable to mechanical damage, humidity, etc. Has somebody compared mechanical durability of various chips?

 

As for bugs, thank you for mentioning that; I probably underestimated this concern. Is it safer to go with tested and true, for a commercial project? Or would you say EFM32 is fairly well tested by now?

[pabigot 355]

Again, most of these concerns need to be answered in context. For the reliability ones, if you're installing into extreme conditions, they're going to matter. If the product sits on a table in a residence, they probably don't.

 

For bugs, as long as you're not working with early stage experimental silicon, it's unlikely you'll come across any that are unknown or don't have reasonable workarounds. When you read the errata list for an MCU, make sure you understand the conditions under which the problem can arise: some of them sound pretty horrible, but in the real world just aren't going to be relevant.

[eck 4]

EFM32 has historically been quite expensive, which has prevented most designers I know from using them.

 

That's what I thought as well, but it appears that the EFM32G and EFM32TG are now priced much better than before, and have quite good availability.