EIGHT-BIT MICROCONTROLLER HAVING A RISC ARCHITECTURE

摘要

An eight-bit RISC based microcontroller includes an eight-bit register file having a dedicated arithmetic logic unit (ALU), in addition to a general purpose eight-bit ALU. The register file further includes means for combining a pair of registers to provide a logical sixteen-bit register for indirect addressing. The dedicated ALU is a sixteen-bit ALU which provides certain arithmetic functions for the register pair, thus alleviating the computational burdens that would otherwise be imposed on the general purpose eight-bit ALU. A further feature of the invention is the inclusion of a paging register which is combined with the contents of the logical sixteen-bit register to provide an even greater addressing range. Yet another feature of the eight-bit microcontroller of the present invention is the means for directly reading and writing to any bit position within the register file with a single instruction. This avoids having to perform various load, shift and/or masking operations needed by prior art microcontrollers.