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mikroElektronika | Free Online Book | PIC Microcontrollers | Introduction: World of Microcontrollers
● TOC
● Introduction
● Ch. 1
● Ch. 2
● Ch. 3
● Ch. 4
● Ch. 5
● Ch. 6
● Ch. 7
● Ch. 8
● Ch. 9
● App. A
● App. B
● App. C
Introduction: World of microcontrollers
The situation we find ourselves today in the field of microcontrollers had its beginnings in the development of technology of integrated circuits.
This development has enabled us to store hundreds of thousands of transistors into one chip. That was a precondition for the manufacture of
microprocessors. The first computers were made by adding external peripherals such as memory, input/output lines, timers and others to it.
Further increasing of package density resulted in creating an integrated circuit which contained both processor and peripherals. That is how the
first chip containing a microcomputer later known as a microcontroller has developed.
This is how it all got started...
In the year 1969, a team of Japanese engineers from BUSICOM came to the USA with a request that a few integrated circuits for calculators were
to be designed according to their projects. The request was sent to INTEL and Marcian Hoff was in charge of the project there. Having experience
working with a computer, the PDP8, he came up with an idea to suggest fundamentally different solutions instead of the suggested design. This
solution presumed that the operation of integrated circuit was to be determined by the program stored in the circuit itself. It meant that
configuration would be simpler, but it would require far more memory than the project proposed by Japanese engineers. After a while, even
though the Japanese engineers were trying to find an easier solution, Marcian’s idea won and the first microprocessor was born. A major help
with turning an idea into a ready-to-use product was Federico Faggin. Nine months after hiring him, Intel succeeded in developing such a product
from its original concept. In 1971 Intel obtained the right to sell this integrated circuit. Before that Intel bought the license from BUSICOM which
had no idea what a treasure it had. During that year, a microprocessor called the 4004 appeared on the market. That was the first 4-bit
microprocessor with the speed of 6000 operations per second. Not long after that, an American company CTC requested from Intel and Texas
Instruments to manufacture an 8-bit microprocessor to be applied in terminals. Even though CTC gave up this project, Intel and Texas
Instruments kept working on the microprocessor and in April 1972 the first 8-bit microprocessor called the 8008 appeared on the market. It was
able to address 16Kb of memory, had 45 instructions and the speed of 300 000 operations per second. That microprocessor was the predecessor
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