"You want to buy the chip for $1 and you expect phone support from highly quality people."

Amazingly enough, some companies work that way
I get "support from highly quality people" from SILabs and I have yet to buy a chip (got by with free samples so far). When this goes into production, I'll only buy 10.000 F126/year.

From Philips the support quality is the same as SILabs (there I am currently only buying ~1000 668s a year) the only chip I will be using there for the next version is a $1 LPC in 1000 qty. For the LPC, they gave me a dev board to get me started.

Now Cypress. I asked them about a USB master and asked if they had some code. The answer was no so I said: "sorry I do not have the coding time, I'll have to use serial though I'd love USB". They came right back with "no problem, what do you need, we will write the code for you". That is for a few 1000s/year of a $5 chip.

So "support from highly quality people", to use Charles phrase, does exist when you know who to deal with (seems anyone but Atmel).

However, one small rant: It used to be you got the answer immediately on the phone, nowadays you often have to wait a few hours. E-mail is not necessarily a blessing.

Erik