TI's C2000 series digital signal controllers provide very high performance, fairly low overhead controllers for inverters, drives, and other computation intensive products.

It is an absolute breath of fresh air to be programming in C rather than 8051 assembly. Among other great features, the part has three independent 32 bit timers directly on the CPU... these totally rock. At 100Mhz system speed, these will give you 10ns resolution over almost 43 seconds. Hello Scheduler!

I have some experience with the 2406/2407 part, mixed assembly and C. I have a lot of experience with the 2800 series part, almost entirely in C. TI's compiler seems to do a pretty good job optimizing, and generally, the only assembly in my code is used for code-start routines or inlined “NOPs” to put a little spacing in to guarantee a physical pin toggling. I have not yet run into an “oh sh?t, this doesn't have the performance” moment with this part and the C compiler.

I use TI's Code Composer fairly sparsely. I do use it for creating the initial makefiles and JTAG-flashing parts. I do archive the project file. Pretty much everything else is done with a Makefile. Open, archivable, change trackable build process is very important to me. As a side benefit, the build process using a makefile seems to run about 5 times as fast... if you're using these parts, try “generate external Makefile” and running make in a shell for grins. I use msys/mingw to provide a somewhat Unixy environment executing on Windows... the makefile will also run in a DOS window. It's a bit of a PITA, and at some point I'm going to delve into what it takes to run TI's code generation tools using a Linux hosted build environment. If TI releases these native to Linux, I'd be willing to pay for it, and I've already paid once for the Windows tool chain.