The reason I've refused to use ATMEL and warned off all my clients as well, was not because they did things so minor as you've pointed out. These guys, i.e. their French design team, attempting get someone on board with their combined ARM7TDMI and DSP, consistently lied about (a) the price of their development products, (b) the functionality of their hardware and development software, and the performance and content of their hardware/firmware. If they had simply said that they were discontinuing development of their product, rather than lying about it, and lying about its features, we'd have written it off as another one of those all-too-common screwups, and moved on, but they strung their customers along, hoping to extract as much money from them as they could, before they admitted what we all already knew, namely that their product's "features", e.g. SDRAM channel, DSP, high-speed linear codec, boot code, etc, simply didn't work.

They lied that their development kit was competitively priced, and it turned out that, once ordered, it was delivered only after a 20x price increase above "market," though, not having been involved at that stage, I didn't know what they had meant by that.

This indicates a manufacturer that is totally devoid of any ethics or consideration for their customers, so I simply avoid them and recommend others do so as well. I don't care that they produce perfectly useable 805x's, if they do so, because none of their products fit my applications, which, generally, require a relatively fast one-clocker with two data pointers, programmable external memory bus cycle length, and pin-compatibility with the original 8051.

Using other packaging would be unreasonable for me, as would using another MCU species. A decade ago, when we had this problem with ATMEL, we were forced to switch to another manufacturer of a similar product, and, for a time, were shipping about 12k units per year. That product is no longer current, so something else is working just fine, AFAIK. I'm no longer involved, as I've gradually managed to reduce my involvement in the business since I've been attempting to retire for some time and hope to get the job done soon so I can put my feet up and focus on the things I find are really fun.

I'm still p*ssed at ATMEL because, thanks to their totally incompetent French design team, we wasted a year of our lives on trying to make their ultimately worthless product work, after which we had to recover from the resulting time and financial loss. I think I have every right to be angry about this and to avoid the source of the trouble. It has absolutely nothing to do with being out of touch, behind the times, or any of the other things of which I'm routinely accused by people who have not yet enjoyed an experience of this sort.

RE