Help on Luminary/TI Road Map

Hi,

I'm new in this forum and following for a while. Please excuse me if I ask something frequently asked.

My experience is over PIC micros. I tried to switch to ARM processors from the very beginning, but couldn't make it. It's because PIC is widely used in Turkey and most of the times I took over an already started project.

But now is time. I'll switch to ARM Cortex no matter what it costs...

So I'm trying to select a brand, as you can guess. To be honest I change my mind over and over again between NXP and Luminary. And now I've seen some cool features from Atmel (SAM3S and SAM3U series).

I need to know something about the road map of Luminary/TI. The plans about the future. This can help me to select the right family and development tool.

* Manufacturing process probably will be changed within the TI acquisition, but "when?" is the critical question.

* Will be there some low pin count M0 cores?

* What about the "Blizzard" and "Whiteout" classes. Can we have some details about them. (And why they are planned for 2011, not 2010?)

* NXP has licensed M4 cores, will Luminary follow?

* Can we have more GPIO's per chip? The best fraction we have with Luminary is 70% but this decreases to 60-65% if we select more peripherals. Will Luminary increase PIN Multiplexing?

* Some of the projects involve much more GPIO's. Will be there 144 pin chips in the near future? (Maybe Firestorm?)

* Some projects can use RS485 and I've read some problems about that. I think it will be very good to have cheap IC's with RS485 support (for telemetry purposes).

* In Atmel's document (http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/6500s.pdf) at section 6.1 (Page 24) you can see a cool feature called ODT (On-Die Termination). This can get rid off some EMI related issues. Are there similar structures for Luminary Micros?

* Can the price tags compete with other brands in the near future? (NXP behaves really aggressive.)

I'll be glad to hear more news, which I haven't mentioned.

Best wishes...