Microcontrollers: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow 3
throughput. With the proliferation of density, FPGA-based embedded
systems offer higher performance with the only challenging issue of
memory required to store their configurations.
The technical community also tends to associate various character-
istics of embedded systems with microprocessors and microcontrollers.
The microprocessors are typically found to dominate the desktop arena
focusing on more and more bit processing capability, with other fea-
tures such as fairly good amount of cache with memory management
and protection schemes supported by the operating system. Although
microcontrollers share flexibility aspect of microprocessors through pro-
gramming, 8-bit versions are more in use (although 16- and 32-bit exist)
with RAM and ROM (instead of cache) added with many on chip
peripherals like timer/counter, decoder, communication interface, etc.
In the literature many embedded systems products have been reported as
microprocessors. On the other side of the processor spectrum, a DSP pos-
sesses special architecture that provides ultra-fast instruction sequences,
such as shift and add, multiply and add, which are commonly used in
math-intensive signal processing applications. The common attributes
associated with the DSPs are multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations,
deep pipelining, DMA processing, saturation arithmetic, separate pro-
gram and data memories, and floating point capabilities required most
of the time. However, the line of differentiation between all these devices
is getting blurred at a rapid pace. With the introduction of fuzzy logic,
artificial intelligence and networked communication capabilities in the
consumer products like refrigerators, mobile phones, and cars, conver-
gence of the architectures of most of the above-mentioned programmable
devices is witnessed by the industry. Today’s ideal microcontroller is
expected to offer plenty of MIPS, run the DSP programs with the same
speed of the DSP processor, integrate all its peripherals and support
flash, communicate with the world with I2C or CAN protocols, with-
stand extremes of environment in a car engine, and cost but a few
cents.
1.3 Vignettes: Microcontrollers
It is interesting to note that the development of microprocessors seems
to be an accident out of the microcontroller synthesis. In 1969, Busicom,
a Japanese company, approached Intel to convert their special pur-
pose ROM and shift register–based calculator cores into a specialized
application specific processor. The objective was the development of
microcontrollers rather than a general purpose of CPU chips for key-
board scanning, display control, printer control, and other functions for