Chapter List

Overview

The PIC microcontroller family is manufactured by Microchip Technology Inc. Currently they are one of the most popular microcontrollers, used in many commercial and industrial applications. Over 120 million devices are sold each year.

The PIC microcontroller architecture is based on a modified Harvard RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) instruction set with dual-bus architecture, providing fast and flexible design with an easy migration path from only 6 pins to 80 pins, and from 384 bytes to 128 kbytes of program memory.

PIC microcontrollers are available with many different specifications depending on:

• Memory Type

  • Flash

  • OTP (One-time-programmable)

  • ROM (Read-only-memory)

  • ROMless

• Input-Output (I/O) Pin Count

  • 4 18 pins

  • 20 28 pins

  • 32 44 pins

  • 45 and above pins

• Memory Size

  • 0.5 1 K

  • 2 4 K

  • 8 16K

  • 24 32K

  • 48 64K

  • 96 128K

• Special Features

  • CAN

  • USB

  • LCD

  • Motor Control

  • Radio Frequency

Although there are many models of PIC microcontrollers, the nice thing is that they are upward compatible with each other and a program developed for one model can very easily, in many cases with no modifications, be run on other models of the family. The basic assembler instruction set of PIC microcontrollers consists of only 33 instructions and most of the family members (except the newly developed devices) use the same instruction set. This is why a program developed for one model can run on another model with similar...