Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Difference b/w microprocessor and microcontroller

The microprocessor is meant to perform as a CPU in a microcomputer system. Microprocessor will have no RAM, ROM or I/O ports in it. It has to be configured with other chips to produce a microcomputer systems. The microprocessor instruction set is arranged to allow instruction code and large amount of data to be moved between microprocessor and external memory using working registers, address pointers etc.

Microcontroller on the other hand is designed to operate with minimal external circuitry using a control program in ROM. The instruction set is simpler in a microcontroller compared to that in microprocessor as instruction are needed to move code and data between internal memory and ALU.

1 comment: