There are various company which offers the 32-bit microcontrollers.

ST, Texas Instrument, Microchip, NXP and Espressif Systems are just to name a few. These all offer a good balance of cost and performance.

Each company offers its development board which host a basic environment to support the microcontroller. Depending upon one’s need one may choose the board.

The 32-bit offering is very wide and you will find it overwhelming to select the microcontroller at first. It is best to finalize your current needs first and then select the microcontroller. Because it is easy to get confused as there are so many.

There are slight differences between these microcontrollers. If you compare the recent microcontroller, you will find that they all offer almost the same processing core, the difference comes in the included peripherals.

Most companies offer their offering in
– Low Power – These are great if you have a battery-driven embedded system. Some of the microcontrollers also host a clock generation circuitry inside the package. Which reduces the cost of the system.
– General Purpose – These microcontrollers offer a balance between low power operation and performance. If you do not have a battery constraint they are good.
– High Performance – These are great if you have really computation hungry system which does on package processing of data. They also have other peripheral’s which can support visual display such as HDMI and Radio control etc. They are the most expensive. Most in general are not suitable for beginers.

As the world is progressing, there is a need to upgrade our product and the 8-bit microcontroller are lagging behind. As the demands are now highly computational. So the 8-bit microcontrollers are lagging. But if you do not have high computational work then these controllers are just what needed. They are built upon so many years of trials and error. There is very little chance that if something is designed properly and working in your lab, that it will work in the external world.

Almost all the manufacturers make these controllers. The price range varies from low cost to high cost.

Atmel(now Microchip) atmega16/16a/32/32a microcontroller is small low cost and low power yet it is sufficient for beginners. They have wide support on the internet.

Well there are a lot of catch with these microcontrollers. Different version of same microcontroller some time differs in functionality. So always check the date code with these microcontrollers.

What I like about these microcontrollers is the fact that they are dirt cheap. And you can easily work with them as if you forget the current limits they will but there are plenty available at affordable rate.

Most 8-bit microcontroller are pretty rugged they can tolerate a wide range of current, temperature and pressure.

There are different microcontroller offered by various companies. There are various parameters that go into selection of microcontroller. This process is very long and very tedious as you have to consider for future expansion of project. A good textbook will easily get you all these information.

8 bit data bus microcontrollers:

Atmel (now Microchip) Atmega series of microcontroller offers a good mix of peripherals and has large community base support widely available on the internet.

Microchips PIC16 series is a bit stable in long term and they have a very small assembly instruction set of 35 instructions.

32 bit data bus microcontroller:

ST has a wide offering of microcontroller. It is a bit overwhelming at first but they all have processor based on ARM cortex M0/M1/M3/M4.

Texas Instrument also offers ARM based microcontroller. But there development kit is expensive for the beginner.

Espressif Systems has various SOC but, the esp8266ex and esp32 are very popular with hobby community as they also incorporates a WiFi and BLE at a very attractive price point.