1. Microprocessors and microcontrollers

1.1 Minimum computer system

From a hardware point of view, a minimal computer system consists of a processor, memory and I/O (figure 1 ).

The task of the processor (Figure 3) is to fetch instructions from memory, decode them and execute them. To this end, it contains an ordinal counter pointing to the memory address where the next instruction to be fetched and executed is located. It also contains an instruction register for storing the instruction code (opcode) being fetched...