PIC Microcontroller - History

History

The original PIC was built to be used with General Instrument's new 16-bit CPU, the CP1600. While generally a good CPU, the CP1600 had poor I/O performance, and the 8-bit PIC was developed in 1975 to improve performance of the overall system by offloading I/O tasks from the CPU. The PIC used simple microcode stored in ROM to perform its tasks, and although the term was not used at the time, it shares some common features with RISC designs.

In 1985, General Instrument spun off their microelectronics division and the new ownership cancelled almost everything — which by this time was mostly out-of-date. The PIC, however, was upgraded with internal EPROM to produce a programmable channel controller and today a huge variety of PICs are available with various on-board peripherals (serial communication modules, UARTs, motor control kernels, etc.) and program memory from 256 words to 64k words and more (a "word" is one assembly language instruction, varying from 12, 14 or 16 bits depending on the specific PIC micro family).

PIC and PICmicro are registered trademarks of Microchip Technology. It is generally thought that PIC stands for Peripheral Interface Controller, although General Instruments' original acronym for the initial PIC1640 and PIC1650 devices was "Programmable Interface Controller". The acronym was quickly replaced with "Programmable Intelligent Computer".

The Microchip 16C84 (PIC16x84), introduced in 1993, was the first Microchip CPU with on-chip EEPROM memory. This electrically erasable memory made it cost less than CPUs that required a quartz "erase window" for erasing EPROM.