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Transistor count of a microcontroller

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manu

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flash transistor count

Hello people,

Just because of my curiosity... About how many silicon transistors there are in a PIC microcontroller or in any microcontroller like them : Thousands, Millions? Somebody know?
 

I a PIC i don´t have much idea, but in a Pentium 4, about 500 million...do the math: uses about the 100-300nm technologie. Pich the total usefull area of the chip, and count then!!
 

PICmicros 16F and 18F series are not so complex as Pentium are. They are 8 bits processors with no cache and execute RISC, don´t have a floating point unit, etc
I read once the average number of transistor inside them but I forgot the exact number, I remember that it is less than 100 thousand and more than 20 thousand (it may depend on the size of program memory, peripherals, ports, etc).
 

You can count 1 transistor for each FLASH bit (i.e. a 16kB FLASH means roughly 100k transistors; plus 6 transistors for each RAM cell (i.e. 1kB RAM is roughly 50k transistors), plus roughly 20-50k transistors for the processing core and peripherals.

However, the size and type of transistors varies wildly depending on their "task". For example, the output transistors are roughly a thousand times bigger than those forming the core logic.

JW
 

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    manu

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