Hi,
Since I'm still at high school (first year), I started studying "Computer organization and architecture" book by William Stalling on my own.

Will that book help me learn Microcontroller Risc Harvard architecture ? I know that there are differences between mcu and computer architecture, for example von neumann vs harvard, memory external located (computer) and so on, but when the book talks about MBR, MAR, is that applicable to mcu?

Thank

 

Welcome to AAC, Roberto.

Microchip has a reference manual here: http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/devicedoc/33023a.pdf

While a lot of that manual deals with the specifics of PIC microcontrollers, the early chapters are more general.

 

Hi,
Since I'm still at high school (first year), I started studying "Computer organization and architecture" book by William Stalling on my own.

Will that book help me learn Microcontroller Risc Harvard architecture ? I know that there are differences between mcu and computer architecture, for example von neumann vs harvard, memory external located (computer) and so on, but when the book talks about MBR, MAR, is that applicable to mcu?

Thank

Don't get lost in architectures. Learn C. Architectures are not relevant to you, unless you want to design chips. Back in the day, it was useful to understand an architecture to know whether a section in a CPU was stack or ram, or how section of a chip were laid out for use (registers, jump tables, etc) Today, not so much- that is all stuff that is only useful for comprehension, but not application at this stage. Back when you had self-modifying code, unrolled-loops, and had to make the most of small RAM footprints, it could be very useful to understand specifics of an architecture-- but those days ended with prefetching, and further down the line, even the architectural differences between intel and motorola were reduced almost to nothing more than MSB .v. LSB in many ways. RISC is reduced instruction set- CISC is Complex instruction set. The former uses lots of less capable instructions to run very fast, the latter uses larger, more capable instructions to do more, but at a slower rate- at least that's where things were before underlying VR engines and better pipeline designs made all of that virtually irrelevant to you in terms of both code and electronics.

Pick an MCU- either PIC or Atmel, figure out what you like to work with, what makes sense. learn C, learn it well. Get your feet wet with the assembly language for the MCU you are interested in and the understanding you gain from assembly language will forever improve your abilities with C.

At the end of the day, electronics is digital and analog. Learning how to write code to interface to either or both of those worlds through the I/O pins and services available to you via your preferred MCU, is what you want to learn.

Join an electronics group with old engineers. Pick their brains, and if you really like it, you may ask them if you can borrow books, buy books, or simply let them know that you'd like to have their books if they ever decided to dump them. Old heads tend to hang on to many of the kinds of books you cannot get anymore, that is the kind of stuff you're wanting. I remember well back near 2000, when universities, book stores, and everybody foolish began dumping all the 'old' knowledge-- fools. Almost every bit of that is as relevant today as it ever was.

 

Unerstood, Thank you

 

Welcome to AAC, Roberto.

Microchip has a reference manual here: http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/devicedoc/33023a.pdf

While a lot of that manual deals with the specifics of PIC microcontrollers, the early chapters are more general.

Thankyou jpanhalt