Intel MCS-96

The Intel MCS-96 is a family of microcontrollers (MCU) commonly used in embedded systems. The family is often referred to as the 8xC196 family, or 80196, the most popular MCU in the family. These MCUs are commonly used in hard disk drives, modems, printers, pattern recognition and motor control.

The family of microcontrollers are 16 bit, however they do have some 32 bit operations. The operates at 16, 20, 25, and 50 MHz, and is separated into 3 smaller families. The HSI (high speed input) family operates at 16 and 20 MHz, the HSO (high speed output) family operates at 16 and 20 MHz, and the EPA (event processor array) family operates at all of the frequencies.

The main features of the MSC 96 family is on-chip memory, Register-to-register architecture, three operand instructions, bus controller to allow 8 or 16 bit bus widths, flat addressability of large register files.

809x/839x/879x family

The 809x/839x/879x ICs are a members of the MCS-96 family. Although MCS-96 is thought of as the 8x196 family, the 8095 was the first member of the family. Later the 8096, 8097, 8395, 8396, and 8397 were added to the family.

The Intel 809x/839x/879x ICs are 12 MHz, 16 bit microcontrollers. The microchip is based on a 5 V, 3 micrometre, HMOS process. The microcontroller has an on-chip ALU, 4 channel 10 bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC), 8 bit pulse width modulator (PWM), watchdog timer, 4 16bit software timers, hardware multiply and divide, and 8 KB of on-chip ROM. The 8095 is ROMless and has five 8 bit high speed I/O, full duplex serial port, as well as an ADC input and PWM output.

The 8095 comes in a 68-pin Ceramic DIP package, and the following part number variants. C8095-90

The 8095 was used in the Roland MT-32. The package type used in the MT-32 was a DIP48 and is pictured above. The above '68-pin CDIP' reference might not be correct?


8x196/8xC196 family

The MCS-96 family is generally thought of as the 80C196 IC, even thought the family includes the 809x/839x/879x microcontrollers, which came first. Members of this sub-family are 80C196, 83C196, 87C196 and 88C196.

Intel 8051

The Intel 8051 is a Harvard architecture, single chip microcontroller (µC) which was developed by Intel in 1980 for use in embedded systems. Intel's original versions were popular in the 1980s and early 1990s, but has today largely been superseded by a vast range of faster and/or functionally enhanced 8051-compatible devices manufactured by more than 20 independent manufacturers including Atmel, Infineon Technologies (formerly Siemens AG), Maxim Integrated Products (via its Dallas Semiconductor subsidiary), NXP (formerly Philips Semiconductor), Nuvoton (formerly Winbond), ST Microelectronics, Silicon Laboratories (formerly Cygnal), Texas Instruments and Cypress Semiconductor. Intel's official designation for the 8051 family of µCs is MCS 51.

Intel's original 8051 family was developed using NMOS technology, but later versions, identified by a letter "C" in their name, e.g. 80C51, used CMOS technology and were less power-hungry than their NMOS predecessors - this made them eminently more suitable for battery-powered devices.

Important features and applications

* It provides many functions (CPU, RAM, ROM, I/O, interrupt logic, timer, etc.) in a single package
* 8-bit data bus - It can access 8 bits of data in one operation (hence it is an 8-bit microcontroller)
* 16-bit address bus - It can access 216 memory locations - 64 kB each of RAM and ROM
* On-chip RAM - 128 bytes ("Data Memory")
* On-chip ROM - 4 kB ("Program Memory")
* Four byte bi-directional input/output port
* UART (serial port)
* Two 16-bit Counter/timers
* Two-level interrupt priority
* Power saving mode

Intel 8048

The Intel 8048 microcontroller (µC) (MCS-48), Intel's first microcontroller, was used in the Magnavox Odyssey² video game console, the Roland Jupiter-4 and Roland ProMars analog synthesizers, and (in its 8042 variant) in the original IBM PC keyboard. The 8048 is probably the most prominent member of Intel's MCS-48 family of microcontrollers. It was inspired by, and is somewhat similar to, the Fairchild F8 microprocessor.

The 8048 has a Modified Harvard architecture, with internal or external program ROM and 64–256 bytes of internal (on-chip) RAM. The I/O is mapped into its own address space, separate from programs and data. Though the 8048 was eventually replaced by the very popular Intel 8051/8031, even at the turn of the millennium it remains quite popular, due to its low cost, wide availability, memory efficient one-byte instruction set, and mature development tools. Because of this it is much used in high-volume consumer electronics devices such as TV sets, TV remotes, toys, and other gadgets where cost-cutting is essential.

The 8049 has 2 KiB of masked ROM (the 8748 and 8749 had EPROM) that can be replaced with a 4 KiB external ROM, as well as 128 bytes of RAM and 27 I/O ports. The µC's oscillator block divides the incoming clock into 15 internal phases, thus with its 11 MHz max. crystal one gets 0.73 MIPS (of one-clock instructions). Some instructions are single byte/cycle ones, but a large amount of opcodes need two cycles and/or two bytes, so the raw performance would be closer to 0.5 MIPS.

Reportedly, most if not all IBM PC AT and PS/2 keyboards contain a variant of the 8049AH microcontroller. An 8042 is located in the PC, and can be accessed through port 0x60 and 0x64 (PII+ PCs have it built into the chipset Super I/O). Also 8042 controls A20 line and "soft boot" to switch Intel 80286 from protected to real mode.

Another variant, the ROM-less 8035, was used in Nintendo's arcade game Donkey Kong. Although not being a typical application for a microcontroller, its purpose was to generate the background music of the game.