Advantage Of 32-bit Microcontrollers

This post shares the advantages of a 32 bit microcontroller unit (MCU) over 8bit and 16bit.

A design engineer from R&D department says that "Couple of years ago, we replaced our 8-bit design of the smart card terminal and fingerprint detection with 32-bit design. Our move was supported by the reduced price of 32-bit MCU. The major advantage we saw was reduction in the overall cost of the system due to decrease in component counts. 8-bit design almost used 18-20 peripheral chips, whereas 32-bit used only five to six chips. 32-bit microcontroller offers advantage of integrated peripherals like I/O lines, TCP/IP and USB along with high performance".

Advantages of 32-bit Microcontroller over 8-bit

1. High operating frequency
2. Low active power requirement
3. Code reuse
4. Code size reduction by40-50 percent
5. Enhanced features for increasingly complex algorithms
6. Cost reduction due to device aggregation
7. External connectivity - Ethernet, USB, CAN
8. Efficient real-time operations
9. Availability of tools.

The bigger=st challenge for embedded manufacturers is the availability of the many differing architectures and implementations from different MCU vendors. There is a need to support every such architecture used in the projects and therefore the engineering efficiency. The 32-bit microcontroller in an embedded system has two-fold advantage in terms of executing code. The 32-bit MCU takes one clock cycle for execution of two bytes, which is twice as quick as compared to 8-bit and 16-bit. Fewer clock cycles means longer sleeping time and therefore energy saving, while smaller code size allows smaller memory size and therefore cost saving.