I'll have a look at their stuff. $6.00 is pretty reasonable. I thought they were a lot more pricy.
as I said, that is an urban legend

How long have you been using them? Any issues?
2-3 years.
If you read my musings in the PIC thread you will have found my dislike of "free" tools. Now, of course, a free tool is better than no tool at all. All SILabs uCs comes with a $<100 IDE with an ICE-like JTAG debugger (I think $76 or so for just the debugger, but buy a devboard for $99/$149, you get debugger, cables, power supply and devboard). The debugger is in desperate need of roachkiller. I am stuck at rel 2.1 although they are now at 2.55, simply because that is the release with, for my use, the most manageable bugs (anyone that have an EC2 or EC3 interested, ask and I'll mail you the install file), of course that forces me to use chips that were available at that time for debugging.
The chips themselves stay away from f3xx seem to be less ridden with errors than most, a few issues have been hidden in the datasheet, but any posting of a problem created by those on the SILabs forum http://www.cygnal.org/scripts/U...tion=intro get an immediate response. Now, maybe I expect too much - Do i?, I have suggested they start chan

Basically I'm happy with the SIlabs chips, and "live with" the shortcomings of the ICElike debugger. My mainstay is the f12x/f13x 100MHz oneclockers. For the last 2 years 85% of all my new development has been SILabs based and the shortcomings/bugs of the EC2 is, by now, second nature to avoid. Many that are cost conscious rave about the debugger.

Erik

The "stay away from f3xx" is not because the chips are bad, they are not, just that with this series SILabs has deviated from the '51 standard to such an extent that it will drive you cvrazy.