The microcontroller is
A microcontroller is a special microchip designed to control various electronic devices. Microcontrollers first appeared in the same year as general-purpose microprocessors.
Microcontroller designers came up with a clever idea – to combine processor, memory, ROM and peripherals inside one housing that looked like an ordinary microchip. Ever since, microcontrollers have far outnumbered processors every year, and the demand for them has never diminished.
Dozens of companies produce microcontrollers, and not only modern 32-bit microcontrollers, but also 16-bit and even 8-bit microcontrollers (such as the i8051 and others). Within each family, you can often find almost identical models, differing in CPU speed and memory size.
The fact is that microcontrollers are mostly used in embedded systems, in toys, in machine tools, in mass home appliances, in home automation – where not the power of the processor is needed, but rather a balance between price and sufficient functionality.
That’s why the oldest types of microcontrollers are still around – they can do everything from automatically open doors and turn on lawn irrigation to integrate into a smart home system. But there are more powerful microcontrollers, capable of hundreds of millions of operations per second and packed to the teeth with peripherals. They have relevant tasks, too. Thus the developer first evaluates the task, and then chooses a suitable hardware for it.
Today there are over 200 microcontroller modifications compatible with i8051, produced by two dozen companies and a lot of microcontrollers of other types. Microchip Technology’s 8-bit PIC microcontrollers and Atmel’s AVR, TI’s 16-bit MSP430 and ARM’s 32-bit microcontrollers, which ARM Limited develops and sells licenses to other companies to produce them.
A microcontroller is characterized by a large number of parameters because it is a complex program-controlled device and an electronic device (microcircuit) at the same time. The prefix “micro” in the name of the microcontroller means that it is made by microelectronic technology.
During operation, the microcontroller reads commands from the memory or input port and executes them. What each command means is determined by the command system of the microcontroller. The command system is embedded in the architecture of the microcontroller and the execution of the command code is expressed in the execution of certain microoperations by the internal elements of the chip.
Microcontrollers allow flexible control of various electronic and electrical devices. Some microcontroller models are so powerful that they can directly switch relays (e.g. on Christmas tree lights).
The microcontrollers usually do not work alone, but are soldered into a circuit where screens, keyboard inputs, various sensors, etc. are connected in addition to it.
Microcontroller software can appeal to those who love to “chase bits” because typically microcontroller memory is between 2 and 128 KB. If it is less then it is assembler or Forth, if it is possible then it is Basic or Pascal but mostly it is C. Before the final programming of the microcontroller, it is tested in emulators – software or hardware.