Rainbow Electronics ATAR862-8 - Manual (Page 14)

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ATAR862-8
4589B–4BMCU–02/03
Introduction
The ATAR862-8 is a member of Atmel’s family of 4-bit single-chip microcontrollers. It
contains ROM, RAM, parallel I/O ports, two 8-bit programmable multifunction
timer/counters, voltage supervisor, interval timer with watchdog function and a sophisti-
cated on-chip clock generation with integrated RC-, 32-kHz and 4-MHz crystal
oscillators.
Table 1. Available Variants of M4xCx9x
MARC4 Architecture
General Description
The MARC4 microcontroller consists of an advanced stack-based, 4-bit CPU core and
on-chip peripherals. The CPU is based on the Harvard architecture with physically sep-
arated program memory (ROM) and data memory (RAM). Three independent buses,
the instruction bus, the memory bus and the I/O bus, are used for parallel communica-
tion between ROM, RAM and peripherals. This enhances program execution speed by
allowing both instruction prefetching, and a simultaneous communication to the on-chip
peripheral circuitry. The extremely powerful integrated interrupt controller with associ-
ated eight prioritized interrupt levels supports fast and efficient processing of hardware
events. The MARC4 is designed for the high-level programming language qFORTH.
The core includes both an expression and a return stack. This architecture enables
high-level language programming without any loss of efficiency or code density.
Figure 10. MARC4 Core
Components of
MARC4 Core
The core contains ROM, RAM, ALU, program counter, RAM address registers, instruc-
tion decoder and interrupt controller. The following sections describe each functional
block in more detail.
Version Type ROM E2PROM Peripheral Packages
Flash
device
T48C862 4-Kbyte EEPROM 64-bytes SSO24
Production ATAR862 4-Kbyte Mask ROM 64-bytes SSO24
Instruction
decoder
CCR
TOS
ALU
RAM
RP
X
Y Program
256 x 4-bit
MARC4 CORE
Clock
Reset
Sleep
Memory bus
I/O bus
Instruction
bus
Reset
System
clock
Interrupt
controller
On-chip peripheral modules
memory
SP
PC