By Jacob Borgeson
Microcontrollers (MCUs) today are amazing examples of synergy and innovation. Anywhere from 30,000 to 2 million gates are contained on a single chip, and up until very recently, the various integrated components and modules were considered advanced ICs on their own.
For example, currently a typical MCU device (Figure 1, below) may contain the following components: 120kB Flash, 8kB RAM, (4) 16-bit timers, supply voltage supervisor, Brownout Reset, programmable low-dropout regulator, I2C, SPI, UART, IrDA, Direct Memory Access controller, hardware multiplier (32×32), Analog Comparator, 12 channel 12-bit SAR analog-to-digital converter, 12-bit digital-to-analog converter,3 op amps, and 48 general purpose input/output pins ” all on a 100 pin device!
