Small 8 bit Microcontrollers have their place in the world of electronics. There are a numerous number of products/ projects requiring the use of small microcontrollers. These micro’s usually come in 8 bit SOIC or SOT23 packages.
let us compare a few of these microcontrollers here and see how powerful these small little beauties are.
There are many of these microcontrollers in the market. Some of the controllers listed here are not only tiny but these controllers are also loaded with many functions and powerful. Let us take a look at ATTiny412 a AVR controller, The PIC12F1840 a PIC controller, and the STM8L050 from STMicrcoelectronics. All these controllers are available in 8 pin SOIC package.
ATTiny412 – AVR – Microchip
The ATtiny412 is a microcontroller using the 8-bit AVR® processor with a hardware multiplier, running at up to 20 MHz and 4 KB Flash, 256B SRAM and 128B of EEPROM in an 8-pin package.
- 6 Channels Event System
- Configurable Custom Logic (CCL)
- 12 Channel 10-bit ADC with Voltage Reference
- 8-bit Digital to Analog Converter (DAC)
- Comparators
- 1x 12-bit Timers (TCD)
- 2x 16-bit Timer (TCA / TCB)
- Cyclical Redundancy Check (CRC/SCAN)
- Watchdog Timer (WDT)
- Power-On Reset (POR)
- Brown-Out Detection (BOD)
- Single pin programming and debugging interface (UPDI)
- Operation Voltage: 1.8V – 5.5V
PIC12F1840 – PIC – Microchip
- Enhanced Mid-range Core with 49 Instruction, 16 Stack Levels
- Flash Program Memory with self read/write capability
- Internal 32MHz oscillator
- Integrated Capacitive mTouch Sensing Module
- Data Signal Modulator Module
- MI2C, SPI, EUSART w/auto baud
- ECCP (Enhanced/Capture Compare PWM) Module
- Comparator with selectable Voltage Reference
- 4 Channel 10b ADC with Voltage Reference
- 25mA Source/Sink current I/O
- Two 8-bit Timers (TMR0/TMR2)
- One 16-bit Timer (TMR1)
- Extended Watchdog Timer (EWDT)
- Enhanced Power-On/Off-Reset
- Brown-Out Reset (BOR)
- In Circuit Serial Programming (ICSP)
- On Board In-Circuit Debug
- Wide Operating Voltage (1.8V – 5.5V)
- Low Power PIC12LF182x variants (1.8V – 3.6V)
- Standby Current (PIC12LF1840): 20 nA @ 1.8V, typical
- Active Current (PIC12LF1840): 50uA/MHz @ 1.8V, typical
STM8L050J3 – STM8 – STMicroelectronics
- Operating conditions
- Operating power supply: 1.8 V to 3.6 V Temperature range: -40 °C to 125 °C
- Low-power features
- 5 low-power modes: Wait, Low-power run (5.1 µA), Low-power wait (3 µA), Active-halt with RTC (1.3 µA), Halt (350 nA)
- Ultra-low leakage per I/O: 50 nA
- Fast wakeup from Halt: 5 µs
- Advanced STM8 core
- Harvard architecture and 3-stage pipeline
- Max freq: 16 MHz, 16 CISC MIPS peak
- Up to 6 external interrupt sources
- Reset and supply management
- Low power, ultra-safe BOR reset with 5 selectable thresholds
- Ultra-low power POR/PDR
- Programmable voltage detector (PVD)
- Clock management
- 32 kHz and 1 to 16 MHz crystal oscillators
- Internal 16 MHz factory-trimmed RC
- Internal 38 kHz low consumption RC
- Clock security system
- Low-power RTC
- BCD calendar with alarm interrupt
- Digital calibration with +/- 0.5 ppm accuracy
- LSE security system
- Auto-wakeup from Halt w/ periodic interrupt
- Memories
- 8 Kbytes of Flash program memory and 256 bytes of data EEPROM with ECC
- Flexible write and read protection modes
- 1 Kbyte of RAM
- DMA
- 4 channels supporting ADC, SPI, I2C, USART, timers
- 1 channel for memory-to-memory
- 12-bit ADC up to 1 Msps/4 channels
- Internal reference voltage
- Timers
- Two 16-bit timers with 2 channels (used as IC, OC, PWM), quadrature encoder
- One 8-bit timer with 7-bit prescaler
- 2 watchdogs: 1 Window, 1 Independent
- Beeper timer with 1, 2 or 4 kHz frequencies
- Communication interfaces
- Synchronous serial interface (SPI)
- Fast I2C 400 kHz SMBus and PMBus
- USART
- Up to 6 I/Os, all mappable on interrupt vectors
- Development support
- Fast on-chip programming and non-intrusive debugging with SWIM
- Bootloader using USART
- Two ultra-low-power comparators
- One with fixed threshold and another one with rail to rail
- Wakeup capability
- Operating conditions
