8-, 16-, and 32-bit MCUs

While engineers often don’t have the time or the interest to look at marketing data, it is very interesting to see the trends in microcontroller sales. Tom Starnes, processor analyst at Objective-Analysis (Austin, TX, http://www.objective-analysis.com) provided us with some data and commented that “there has been a significant change in MCU implementation over the past five years, largely attributed to price compression that has attracted more engineers to move up the bit-size path.

“In that time period, 32-bit revenue has grown substantially, while 8-bit had 10% less of the total market revenue than it had five years ago. In the middle, 16-bit has held share at about 30%—undoubtedly due to a migration of 8 to 16, and 16 to 32.”

These figures represent microcontrollers only and do not include microprocessorsthat is, processors that do not have on-board memory such as many PowerPC chips and PC processors, nor processor IP in ASICs and ASSP chips.

2006 MicrocontrollerRevenuebyBit Size2006 MicrocontrollerUnit ShipmentbyBit Size