These features affect the operation and performance on embedded platform.
For instance, as you design your project, you will have to answer questions such as,
how much memory will I need for my application?
How fast does my application need to run?
And what kind of mathematical support do I need?
You likely need to have some of these answers before you commit to a particular
microcontroller.
The process of creating this feature and
operation requirements checklist is called a specification, or a features spec.
It's possible that you need to make significant software changes, or
even a hardware change, in the middle of a design process
if you did not evaluate your initial designs correctly.
In general, you do not select a chip or a part at random.
There is some investigation of features and specs needed at the beginning of
a project, which includes some prototyping and proof of concept.
Fortunately, manufacturers help with this process by providing resources to analyze
their products.
There are many documents that describe how to pick out a platform or
evaluate a particular chip.
We start with discussing the Selector Guide.
This helps a user slip down choices by interactively selecting feature sets
for our design.
It shows a full processor family.
A chip family will share the same chip architecture.
Each sub-family typically has more differences in supported hardware.
And each device in a sub-family only has a slightly variances from
one sub-family part to another.
This guide example is somewhat of a painful chart to look at
to select the part.
However, this guide usually has a web-based
interface which makes it much easier to search through.
If you find some interesting parts from the selector guide,
you can obtain some more information using the product brief.
This gives a concise overview for quick evaluation of a platform for
design, but more details than what you will see in the selector guide.
This is much more marketed, and
is far less dense than strict product specifications.