This book provides practicing scientists and engineers a tutorial on the fundamental concepts and use of microcontrollers. Today, microcontrollers, or single integrated circuit (chip) computers, play critical roles in almost all instrumentation and control systems. Most existing books arewritten for undergraduate and graduate students taking an electrical and/or computer engineering course. Furthermore, these texts have beenwritten with a particular model of microcontroller as the target discussion. These textbooks also require a requisite knowledge of digital design fundamentals. This textbook presents the fundamental concepts common to all microcontrollers. Our goals are to present the over–arching theory of microcontroller operation and to provide a detailed discussion on constituent subsystems available in most microcontrollers. With such goals, we envision that the theory discussed in this book can be readily applied to a wide variety of microcontroller technologies, allowing practicing scientists and engineers to become acquainted with basic concepts prior to beginning a design involving a specific microcontroller. We have found that the fundamental principles of a given microcontroller are easily transferred to other controllers. Although this is a relatively small book, it is packed with useful information for quickly coming up to speed on microcontroller concepts.
