The Japanese company endorsed the Intel design for its simplicity and flexibility in late 1969, rather than the conventional implementation.įederico Faggin joined Intel in spring 1970 3 and by the end of the year had produced working samples of the first chip set. Besides giving the chip a longer and more profitable life, Intel were in the business of making memories – and computer-like architectures need lots of memory. Why not make a simple computer central computing unit (CPU) on silicon? This could then be programmed to implement the calculator functions, and as time progressed these could be enhanced by developing this software. Engineer Ted Ho – reputedly while on a topless beach in Tahiti – came up with a revolutionary way to tackle this project.
This of course would reduce an LSI product’s profitability and increase its cost. At that time calculators were a fast-evolving product and any LSI devices were likely to be superseded within a few years. In 1970 they were approached by the Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation, and asked to manufacture a suitable chip set for a line of calculators to be named Busicom. 2 Within three years, Intel had developed all the basic types of semiconductor memories used today – dynamic and static RAMs and EPROMs.ġMoore’s law stated in 1964 that the number of elements on a chip would double every 18 months, although this was subsequently revised to 2 years.ĢReputed to stand for INTELligence or INTegrated ELectronics.ħ8 The Quintessential PIC MicrocontrollerĪs a sideline Intel also designed large-scale integrated circuits to customers’ specifications.
From a historical perspective the story begins in 1968 when Robert Noyce (one of the inventors of the integrated circuit), Gordon Moore 1 and Andrew Grove left the Fairchild Corporation and founded their own company, which they called Intel. Thus we begin by investigating the origins of the MPU. In essence it is a MPU with on-board system support circuitry. What exactly is a microcontroller unit? In a nutshell, a microcontroller is a MicroProcessor Unit (MPU) which is integrated with memory and input/output peripheral interface functions on the (usually) one integrated circuit. Know what peripheral functions are integral to the PIC16F84.Appreciates the principle of banking in the Data store and its relationship to the RP0 control bit in the Status register.Understand the interaction between the clock phases and the internal sequence of micro-operations.