Embedded Systems Design, 2nd Edition

Embedded processors 23

tion with extensions for immediate values, address offsets and so

on. It supported both non-maskable and software interrupts.

These type of processors have largely been replaced today

by the microcontroller versions which have the same or advanced

processor architectures and instruction sets but have the added

advantage of glueless interfaces to memory and peripherals incor-

porated onto the chip itself. Discrete processors are still used but

these tend to be the higher performance devices such as the

MC68000 and 80x86 processors. But even with these faster and

higher performance devices, the same trend of moving to inte-

grated ...