Microcontroller 8051
Microcontroller 8051
INTRODUCTION TO MICROCONTROLLERS
8051 MICROCONTROLLER:
The Intel 8051 microcontroller is one of the most popular general purpose microcontrollers
in use today. The success of the Intel 8051 spawned a number of clones which are collectively
referred to as the MCS-51 family of microcontrollers, which includes chips from vendors such
as Atmel, Philips, Infineon, and Texas Instruments
The Intel 8051 is an 8-bit microcontroller which means that most available operations are
limited to 8 bits. There are 3 basic "sizes" of the 8051: Short, Standard, and Extended. The Short
and Standard chips are often available in DIP (dual in-line package) form, but the Extended 8051
models often have a different form factor, and are not "drop-in compatible". All these things are
called 8051 because they can all be programmed using 8051 assembly language, and they all
share certain features (although the different models all have their own special features).
Some of the features that have made the 8051 popular are:
8051 models may also have a number of special, model-specific features, such as UARTs,
ADC, Op-Amps, etc...
Typical applications:
8051 chips are used in a wide variety of control systems, telecom applications, robotics as
well as in the automotive industry. By some estimation, 8051 family chips make up over 50%
of the embedded chip market.
Basic Pins:
Pin 9
ports upon starting up. (Pin should be held high for 2 machine cycles.)
Pins 18 & 19: The 8051 has a built-in oscillator amplifier hence we need to only connect a
crystal at these pins to provide clock pulses to the circuit.
Pin 40 and 20: Pins 40 and 20 are VCC and ground respectively. The 8051 chip needs +5V
500mA to function properly, although there are lower powered versions like the Atmel 2051
which is a scaled down version of the 8051 which runs on +3V.
Pins 29, 30 & 31: As described in the features of the 8051, this chip contains a built-in flash
memory. In order to program this we need to supply a voltage of +12V at pin 31. If external
memory is connected then PIN 31, also called EA/VPP, should be connected to ground to indicate
the presence of external memory. PIN 30 is called ALE (address latch enable), which is used
when multiple memory chips are connected to the controller and only one of them needs to be
selected. We will deal with this in depth in the later chapters. PIN 29 is called PSEN. This is
"program store enable". In order to use the external memory it is required to provide the low
voltage (0) on both PSEN and EA pins.
Ports:
There are 4 8-bit ports: P0, P1, P2 and P3.
PORT P1 (Pins 1 to 8): The port P1 is a general purpose input/output port which can be used
for a variety of interfacing tasks. The other ports P0, P2 and P3 have dual roles or
additional functions associated with them based upon the context of their usage.
PORT P3 (Pins 10 to 17): PORT P3 acts as a normal IO port, but Port P3 has additional
functions such as, serial transmit and receive pins, 2 external interrupt pins, 2 external
counter inputs, read and write pins for memory access.
PORT P2 (pins 21 to 28): PORT P2 can also be used as a general purpose 8 bit port when no
external memory is present, but if external memory access is required then PORT P2 will
act as an address bus in conjunction with PORT P0 to access external memory. PORT P2
acts as A8-A15, as can be seen from fig 1.1
PORT P0 (pins 32 to 39) PORT P0 can be used as a general purpose 8 bit port when no
external memory is present, but if external memory access is required then PORT P0 acts
as a multiplexed address and data bus that can be used to access external memory in
conjunction with PORT P2. P0 acts as AD0-AD7, as can be seen from fig 1.1
Oscillator Circuits
The 8051 requires the existence of an external oscillator circuit. The oscillator circuit usually
runs around 12MHz, although the 8051 (depending on which specific model) is capable of
running at a maximum of 40MHz. Each machine cycle in the 8051 is 12 clock cycles,
giving an effective cycle rate at 1MHz (for a 12MHz clock) to 3.33MHz (for the
maximum 40MHz clock).
Internal Architecture
Data and Program Memory
The 8051 Microprocessor can be programmed in PL/M, 8051 Assembly, C and a number of
other high-level languages. Many compilers even have support for compiling C++ for an 8051.
Program memory in the 8051 is read-only, while the data memory is considered to be
read/write accessible. When stored on EEPROM or Flash, the program memory can be
rewritten when the microcontroller is in the special programmer circuit.
Direct Memory
The 8051 has 256 bytes of internal addressable RAM, although only the first 128 bytes are
available for general use by the programmer. The first 128 bytes of RAM (from 0x00 to 0x7F)
are called the Direct Memory, and can be used to store data.
The 8051 has 4 selectable banks of 8 addressable 8-bit registers, R0 to R7. This means that there are
essentially 32 available general purpose registers, although only 8 (one bank) can be directly
accessed at a time. To access the other banks, we need to change the current bank number in the flag
status register.
A and B Registers
The A register is located in the SFR memory location 0xE0. The A register works in a similar
fashion to the AX register of x86 processors. The A register is called the accumulator, and by
default it receives the result of all arithmetic operations. The B register is used in a similar manner,
except that it can receive the extended answers from the multiply and divide operations. When not
being used for multiplication and Division, the B register is available as an extra general-purpose
register.