I got a lucky chance to do one month internship in Freescale Semiconductors Pvt Ltd, Noida (no introduction required!), just after finishing my second year. Due to my limited knowledge and time, I was given the task of making a report on the fundamentals of microcontrollers. The work helped me gain some useful insights in the underlying concepts related to microcontrollers and I would suggest any newbie about to jump into the embedded world to go through this report, first.

Introduction from the report is given below. Complete report can be downloaded from the following link :-                                                                                                                             Click to download the Freescale Internship Report

Introduction

In 1971, Intel released 4004 microprocessor. Since then, there has been a revolution in this field of electronics and microchips have truly changed the way we live. Today, we see microprocessors in our PCs and laptops, but we fail to notice their younger (and more power efficient) brothers, the Microcontrollers. Without MCUs, our iPods won’t exist; latest Nokia cell phone will stop working; Game Boy Advance would not have been conceived; this would have been a world without a digital wristwatch!

First microcontroller was Intel’s 8048 released in 1976. Many manufacturers have joined the bandwagon since then and are actually producing better MCUs then Intel itself, though Intel 8051 architecture is the de-facto standard in the 8 bit market.

This report deals with Microcontroller’s technical aspects, latest market trends, some general but important applications and future road map.

• Part 1  Deals with the technical aspects of a microcontroller. From differentiating 8, 16 and 32 architectures it gives insight into some important technical terms and concepts related to MCUs. It should be noted, however, that these terms/concepts apply equally well to Microprocessors. Section 1.7 gives a general advice to the reader in choosing the best processing option available today given his processing requirements.
• Part 2  Deals with the market trends/analysis. It has some very useful stats regarding microcontrollers in general. Also, there are topics discussing about the future of 16 bit MCUs as well as dominance of 8 bitter in the automobile market.
• Part 3  Deals with various microcontroller applications.
• Part 4  Deals with the future road map of MCUs as well computing in general. Gives an insight into 64 bit computing. Also there’s an interesting discussion on ‘256 bit computing’.

Microcontroller Analysis – Technical, Marketing and Application Perspective by Pranjal Chaubey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.