I’m vacationing in Denver at the moment. Rich Ottosen and I are upgrading our closed-caption decoder to use a Microchip PIC16F627 rather than the PIC16C622 we previously used. The new chip has several advantages:
- flash memory — the PIC16C622 was OTP.
- in-circuit-debug support — requires a special bond-out adapter, though — $35 from Digikey.
- hardware UART — no more bit-banging the serial port
- hardware PWM — useful for running the voltage inverter used to product the -4V supply for the EIA-232 level shifter. This was also previously done by bit-banging. Now we can use smaller capacitors due to the higher frequency.
- more timers — we can use one of the timers to count the horizontal sync pulses.