On Thu, Apr 04, 2002 at 01:58:44PM +0000, Joseph Knapka wrote: > On 4/4/02, 7:13:13 AM, Dan Erickson <coldoneknight@rogers.com> wrote > regarding Microcontrollers: > > That is the link to the microcontroller. What I was wondering is, > > what is a microcontroller? what are they used for? can linux even be used > > on this thing? and who has one of them? > > A microcontroller is just a microprocessor with lots of > on-chip I/O and timer logic. They usually also have a > significant chunk of EEPROM program memory and usually a bit > of RAM on the chip, too. So you can use a microcontroller > and a tiny bit of interface logic to implement a complete > embedded system. On board EEPROM/Flash/RAM depends a lot on the chip. Lots of ARM based microcontrollers are considered real microcontrollers yet they don't have any memory on chip. It's my experience that low end controllers have integrated memory, while the high end stuff usually doesn't. > Often, microcontrollers are I/O-enhanced versions > of general-purpose microprocessors. For example, the > Motorola MC6811 is the microcontroller version of the > 6809, IIRC. Yup. SA-110 is the generic StrongARM CPU, SA-1100 and SA-1110 are the microcontroller versions with lots of IO goodies (five serial ports, LCD controller, DRAM controller, PCMCIA interface, timers, etc.). > As to whether Linux can run on the particular chip > you're looking at, I don't know. I did a google > search for "Linux" + various terms from the web > page you cited above, and didn't get any hits, so > there may not be a port to that particular chip > yet. In order for "the real" Linux to run on a chip, the chip usually needs an MMU. ucLinux supports chips without MMU. Erik -- J.A.K. (Erik) Mouw, Information and Communication Theory Group, Faculty of Information Technology and Systems, Delft University of Technology, PO BOX 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands Phone: +31-15-2783635 Fax: +31-15-2781843 Email: J.A.K.Mouw@its.tudelft.nl WWW: http://www-ict.its.tudelft.nl/~erik/ -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
