Question

As an engineer/engineering technologist in todays world, how important, in your opinion, is it to understand the internal operation of microcontrollers? What aspect of the article support your opinion?

Answer 1

Micro-controller are required to do any complex calculations in real time environment. The control circuit of the converter, relay setting, solar integration etc all need a micro-controller to implement the control algorithm. For the that we need to be able to code our control algorithm in its programming language. The instructions of the micro-controller needs addresses and numbers.

Ex- Suppose we want certain commands to be executed if a particular condition is satisfied.

JNC 2514H ( This instruction shows that if carry is not there fetch the instruction from address 2514H and execute. )

If we dont know the structure we can not specify the address on our own.

The internal structures help us understand what exactly we want to do and we can implement.

Ex- For a traffic light controller, we need to design a delay of lets say 60 sec. For that we need to know the structure of the micocontroller. its clock frequency, internal division of frequency( if it is there), sizes of the registers. These basic knowledge we can get from the internal structure of the microcontroller.