May 2005
Beginner to intermediate
398 pages
12h 12m
English
Content preview from Designing Embedded Hardware, 2nd EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 14. The PIC Microcontrollers
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1 ½ tons.
— Popular Mechanics, March 1949
This chapter introduces you to the Microchip PIC. To start our discussion of microprocessor hardware, we'll look at the basics of creating computer hardware by designing a small computer based on a simple 8-pin PIC processor. The same design principles apply to the AVR and many other microcontrollers. This PIC processor is so simple that building a computer based on one of them is trivial, as you will see. From there, we'll look at a mid-range PIC processor and see just what you need to do to design an embedded computer based on one. First, though, let's take a quick tour of the PIC architectures before getting into designing some computers.
A Tale of Two Processors
In the late 1970s, General Instruments had a 16-bit processor known as the CP1600. It has since passed into extinction and is all but forgotten, long ago losing out to the Intel 8086 and the Motorola 68000. One major failing of the CP1600 was that it had limited I/O capability, and so General Instruments designed a tiny companion processor to act as an I/O controller. The idea was that this controller could provide not only the I/O for the CP1600, but being a processor in its own right, it could provide some degree of intelligent control. This processor was called the Peripheral ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.