The PIC series are eprom based 8-bit micro controllers developed by Microchip Technology
Back in 1965, GI formed a Microelectronics Division, and indeed used this division to generate some of the earliest viable EPROM and EEPROM memory architectures. As you may be aware, the GI
Microelectronics Division were also responsible for a wide variety of digital and analog functions, in the AY3-xxxx and AY5-xxxx families.
GI also generated a 16 bit microprocessor, called the CP1600, in
the early 70s. This was a reasonable microprocessor, but not particularly good at handling i/os. For some very specific applications where good i/o handling was needed, GI designed a Peripheral Interface Controller (or PIC for short), in around 1975. It was designed to be very fast, since it was i/o handling for a 16 bit machine, but didn't need a huge amount of functionality, so its microcoded instruction set was small. Hopefully, you can see what's coming....yes, the architecture designed in '75 is substantially the PIC16C5x architecture today. Granted, the 1975 version was manufactured in NMOS, and was only available in masked ROM versions, but still a good little uC. The market, however, didn't particularly think so, and the PIC remained designed in at a handful of large customers only.
During the early 80s, GI took a long hard look at their
business, and restructured, leaving them to concentrate on their core activities, which is essentially power semiconductors. Indeed they are still doing this very successfully now. GI Microelectronics Division became GI Microelectronics Inc. (a wholly owned subsidiary), which in 85 was finally sold to venture capital investors, including the fab in Chandler, Arizona. The venture capital people took a long hard look at the products in the business, and got rid of most of it - all the AY3- and AY5- parts and a whole bunch of other stuff, leaving the core business of the PIC and the serial and parallel EPROMs and the parallel EPROMs. A decision was taken to restart the new company, named Arizona Microchip Technology, with embedded control as its differentiator from the rest of the pack.
As part of this strategy, the PIC165x NMOS family was
redesigned to use one of the other things that the fledgling company was good at, i.e. EPROM - the concept of the CMOS based, OTP and erasable EPROM program memory PIC16C5x family was born.
Alex R. Baker
IDE
Integrated Development Environment
I'm using Borland's IDE (Both C and Pascal) not only to create PC programs, but also for working with microcontrollers. BC/BP users will appreciate the possibility to invoke MPASM as a transfer
program from the Borland IDE.
Borland IDE Editor have [Tools] menu, where user can run external programs. I use MPASM Assembler, MPSIM Simulator, Telix Terminal and PICLAB Programmer as this programs. To see
the errors and messages after compiling I write a programm-filter MPSM2MSG.EXE , It is Free.
But now I'm prefer using my ASMED Editor.
PICLAB
Some years ago, in the middle of 90th, at the beginning of my "PIC Life", I made a David's Tait
simple programmer. But later I developed my own, Tait-based design. The main feature of the first
PICLAB was not to be a "prototype" but a "Semi-Production". Against the true "production",
PICLAB not verified the chip in the full VDD range - it use two borders (4V and 5.5V). Using of this technology increase the reliability by not expensive solution.
And against Tait' design, the current version of the PICLAB (V2.03) powered from PC (only +5V input).
Attention! PICLAB Software maybe not work on the fast computers.
The FREE version of PICLAB V2.03
See some applications, descriptions, docs (English and Russian) in the Downlad Page.
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