14 Facts About PIC microcontroller

The name PIC microcontroller initially referred to Peripheral Interface Controller, and is currently expanded as Programmable Intelligent Computer.

PIC microcontroller was originally intended to be used with the General Instrument CP1600, the first commercially available single-chip 16-bit microprocessor.

The CP1600 had a complex bus that made it difficult to interface with, and the PIC microcontroller was introduced as a companion device offering ROM for program storage, RAM for temporary data handling, and a simple CPU for controlling the transfers.

PIC microcontroller devices are popular with both industrial developers and hobbyists due to their low cost, wide availability, large user base, an extensive collection of application notes, availability of low cost or free development tools, serial programming, and re-programmable flash-memory capability.

Original PIC microcontroller was intended to be used with General Instrument's new CP1600 16-bit central processing unit .

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The idea was that a device would use the PIC microcontroller to handle all the interfacing with the host computer's CP1600, but use its own internal processor to handle the actual device it was connected to.

For instance, a floppy disk drive could be implemented with a PIC microcontroller talking to the CPU on one side and the floppy disk controller on the other.

In keeping with this idea, what would today be known as a microcontroller, the PIC included a small amount of read-only memory that would be written with the user's device controller code, and a separate random access memory for buffering and working with data.

The PIC microcontroller was upgraded with an internal EPROM to produce a programmable channel controller.

PIC microcontroller cores have skip instructions, which are used for conditional execution and branching.

The PIC microcontroller architecture was among the first scalar CPU designs and is still among the simplest and cheapest.

PIC microcontroller instruction set is suited to implementation of fast lookup tables in the program space.

For example, on PIC microcontroller16, CALL and GOTO have 11 bits of addressing, so the page size is 2048 instruction words.

The original Parallax PIC microcontroller assembler has macros, which hide W and make the PIC microcontroller look like a two-address machine.