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Electrical Engineering

Sketch and describe a basic controller architecture

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Microcontroller Architecture Microcontroller A microcontroller is essentially a small computer on a chip Like any computer it has memory and can be programmed to do calculations receive input and generate output Unlike a PC it incorporates memory a CPU peripherals and IO interfaces into a single chip Microcontrollers are ubiquitous found in almost every electronic device from ovens to iPods clock The AVR has a clock that ticks at a regular rate A variety of clocks types and speeds are available including a builtin circuit or external crystals We use a 16MHz external crystal oscillator for the maximum clock speed the AVR will run at Note how much slower this is than a PC and remember this when you write your code Microcontrollers differ in the number of clock ticks it actually takes to execute an instruction This is why we use the term MIPS or million instructions per second to better describe the speed of a CPU One feature of the AVR is that most instructions are executed in one clock cycle therefore it runs at around 1 MIPS MHz Other microcontrollers running at 16MHz may have less MIPS Architechure Computer architecture is a huge topic in itself We will just develop a general picture of how the AVR microcontroller works It has a Harvard architecture This means that the program and data are stored in separate memory spaces which are accessible simultaneously Therefore while one instruction is being executed the next one can be fetched This is partly how one execution per clock cycle can be achieved With other microcontroller architectures there is only 1 way to access memory so executions and program instruction access must be    See Answer
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