Introduction of PIC18F4550 Microcontroller

PIC18F4550

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PIC18F4550 belongs to pic18f family of microcontrollers. PIC18F4550 is one among the advanced Microcontrollers from the microchip technology. This microcontroller is very famous in between hobbyist and learners due it functionalities and features such as ADC and USB Integration. A typical PIC18F4550 comes in various packages like DIP, QPF and QPN. These packages can be selected according to the project requirement.

Features

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PIC18F4550 is an 8 bit microcontroller. PIC18F4550 has been implemented withNano WATT technology hence it requires very low power for its operation.

PIC18F4550 has 16 bit Instruction Set Architecture, (ISA) which provides a degree of freedom to programmers with various data types , registers ,  instructions, memory architecture, addressing modes, interrupt and IO operations. PIC18F4550 also has an Extended Instruction Set as a special feature; it’s an optional extension to the PIC18 instruction set.

Memory Specifications: A PIC18F4550 has 256 bytes of EEPROM (Electrically Erasable and Programmable Read Only Memory), 2KB of SRAM (Static RAM) and 32KB of flash memory which in return proves another degree of freedom to programmers.

Communication Protocol: PIC18F4550 is remarked as advanced, as it uses well sophisticated protocols for communications. The modern protocols like USB, SPI, EUSART, are well supported in PIC18F4550. These technologies integrate with Nano Watt Technology (as mentioned before) to produce PIC18F4550, a well equipped, low power consuming microcontroller. 

A Dedicated ICD/ICSP Port allows the programmers to code and debug easily.

• Enhanced flash program and the 1KB Dual Access RAM for USB are used for buffering.
• PIC18F4550 consists of up to 13 channels for analog to digital converter. The converter accuracy amounts to 10-bit to convert analog to digital signal relatively.
• PIC18F4550 is compatible to work with different internal and external clock sources. It comes with four built-in timers or an external oscillator can be interfaced for clocking.
• The frequency limit for a PIC18F4550 is from 31 KHz to 48 MHz respectively.
• The microcontroller PIC18F4550 comes with ADC comparators and other such peripherals as an in-built feature.

A very good description and in detailed features of PIC18F4550 microcontroller can be found in its respective datasheet. A copy of that PIC18F4550 Datasheet can be downloaded from kynix’s website.