The book discusses in details the main hardware and firmware fundamentals about micro- controllers. The goal is to present all the concepts necessary to understand and design an embedded system based on microcontrollers.
The book discusses on:
- Binary logic and arithmetic;
- Embedded-systems basics;
- Low-end 8-bit microcontrollers by Microchip and STMicroelectronics;
- On-chip memories, Input/Output ports, peripherals;
- Assembly instruction sets;
- EasyPIC evaluation board by MikroElektronika;
- High-end 32-bit cores by ARM-Cortex;
- STM32F4 microprocessor by STMicroelectronics;
- Nucleo board for STM32F4 by STMicroelectronics;
- Custom developed board.
The book is not targeted for just either low-end or high-end microcontrollers. Instead, the book fully describes both, moving from the basics of microcontroller systems, to 8-bit devices and then to the 32-bit ones.In fact, the book targets well-renowned, commercially-available microcontrollers by the microelectronic leaders in the field. As for low-end 8-bit microcontrollers, the book reviews the widely-spread and well-assessed devices by Microchip (the PIC16 family) and by STMicroelectronics (the ST6 family). Instead, as for high-end 32-bit microcontrollers, the book presents the leading-edge M3 and M4 cores by ARM-Cortex and its implementation by STMicroelectronics (the STM32F4 series).The Book is very modular and most Chapters can be used as stand-alone mini text books (e.g., Chapter 3 – “8-bit microcontrollers”, Chapter 5 – “ARM-Cortex architectures”, Chapter 6 – “STM32 microcontroller”). Moreover, Chapter 4 and Chapter 7 provide a very useful insight to electronic circuits employing microcontrollers and on-board components, by means of the EasyPIC v7 board by Mikroelektronika (for PIC microcontrollers) and Nucleo board by STmicroelectronics (for the STM32 ARM-Cortex M4 microcontrollers).
FRANCO ZAPPA is full professor of Electronics at the Dept. of Electronics, Computer Science and Bioengineering of Politecnico di Milano. He teaches “Electronic Systems” at the M.S. in Electronics Engineering, “Microcontrollers” at the B.S. in Electronics Engineering, and “Electronics” at the B.S. in Biomedical Engineering. His research interests are in microelectronics and electronic instrumentation.