A New 8 Bit C-programmable Microcontroller for Embedded Multitasking Applications

A new 8 bit microcontroller with reduced instruction set has been designed. The controller, code named T2, has been developed especially for embedded controller applications which require multitasking and fast interrupt handling at medium data throughput. Furthermore the architecture was designed to be programmed in C. To support these requirements, the controller has 256 programmer visible registers and 256 Byte of on chip RAM. The instruction set consists of (basically) 20 instructions and instruction groups and provides an efficient target for C compilers. The instruction set and the datapath width may be adapted to the application needs using a full top-down synthesis flow. The address width for external and program memory is 16 bit. The target clock frequency is 16 MHz. The industrial significance of this development is shown by the rapidly growing demand for code efficient HLL-programming in the "embedded" market.