Processor Core

The processor core (CPU) is the main part of any microcontroller. It is often taken from an existing processor, e.g. the MC68306 microcontroller from Motorola contains a 68000 CPU. You should already be familiar with the material in this section from other courses, so we will briefly repeat the most important things but will not go into details. An informative book about computer architecture is [HP90] or one of its successors.

Architecture

Figure 2.1: Basic CPU architecture.

A basic CPU architecture is depicted in Figure 2.1. It consists of the data path, which executes instructions, and of the control unit, which basically tells the data path what to do.