Microcontroller

Basic Interface / By /

A microcontroller is a small, low-cost microcomputer on a single VLSI integrated circuit (IC) chip. It is used in different Embedded purpose. The microcontroller puts CPU and peripherals on a single chip.In a single cyclea microcontroller can transfer and process information of 8 bits, 16 bits and 32 bits. You can see the internal block diagram

Microcontrollers consist of the following mentioned components:

  1. Central Processing Unit (CPU)
  2. Flash Memory or Static Memory (Flash/SRAM)
  3. Electrical Erasable programmable RAM (EEPRAM)
  4. Timers and Counters
  5. I/O Ports (I/O – Input/Output)
  6. Clock Circuit (Oscillator/RC Circuit)
  7. External/Internal Interrupt
  8. CAN (Controlled Area Network)
  9. SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) 
  10. I2C/TWI (Inter Integrated Circuit/Two Wire Interface)
  11. DAC (Digital to Analog Converter)
  12. ADC (Analog to Digital Converter)
  13. UASRT(Universal Synchronous and Asynchronous Serial Receiver and Transmitter)
  14. Watchdog Timer and Sleep mode or Power saving mode.

Microprocessor & Microcontroller

Microprocessor is a type of computer processor in which both the data processing logic and control are included on a single integrated circuit or on small numbers of integrated circuits. These processors consist of logic, control and arithmetic circuits. Its integrated circuit is capable of interpreting and executing program instructions. These are multiple purpose, clock-driven and register based digital integrated circuits that accept input in binary data and processes it as per the instruction stored in its memory. Example CISC(Complex Instruction Set Computer), DSP(Digital Signal Processing), RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) etc.