32-bit Micro

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movie_freak

Joined: 20 Mar 2007
Posts: 81
Helped: 2

09 Jun 2009 8:41 difference between 8bit,16bit,32bit

What are the key differences and things to look out for when shifting from one class of micro controllers to other especially between 8-bit to 16-bit?

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arthur0

Joined: 28 Nov 2003
Posts: 73
Helped: 9
Location: Stockholm, Sweden

09 Jun 2009 10:07 8 bit,16bit,32 bit differnce

If you write assembly code, everything is different, including the instruction set, so I’ll assume you plan to write code in a higher level programming language (such as C), to give some meaning to the question.

Well, in C there’s virtually no difference, except when you optimized your code for a specific architecture or, possibly, when you do bit manipulations and communications, where you’ll need to specifically control the size of your variables (‘int’ won’t do since it can be 2 or 4-bytes long).
There may also be the issue of aligning your structures in memory and the impossibility (or inefficiency) to do accesses from oddly aligned addresses on some architectures, but if you write portable code, the compiler transparently takes care about that.
Other than that, I can’t think o anything more to add.

Arthur