Do Microcontrollers Really Need to Be This Complex?

Have you looked at an MCU user’s manual lately? If you haven’t, take a guess at how many pages a typical one contains. Go ahead, I’ll wait while you take a guess.

Perhaps you would be surprised that a typical MCU user’s manual can now exceed 2,000 pages. Now it’s true that if the DC and AC characteristics are left out, you can sometimes get below 1,000 pages, but I consider that cheating.

How many of these 2,000 pages do I need to read and, more importantly, understand, in order to use an MCU? It better not be all 2,000 pages.

How did we get to MCUs of such complexity that a typical one requires what I call the user’s manual “cube” (since if you print it out, it is close to a cube of paper – no, not a cubicle, at least not yet).

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Perhaps the ubiquitous use of the ARM processor has created a need for the MCU manufacturers to differentiate their devices with more and more complex peripherals? Perhaps users have asked for more advanced features and the MCU manufacturers have just done what was asked? The resulting devices have all of the features we all have asked for. Whatever the reason, we now have devices that are much more difficult to design with than the MCUs I remember from just a decade ago.

Is there any hope that MCUs will get easier to design with? Perhaps there is. Most MCU manufacturers and third-party tool vendors are providing drivers for their peripherals that can “hide” the complexity of the massive number of configuration registers and parameter settings that peripherals require. If I can just provide a capture rate and capture mode to the ADC driver and a location for the buffer to be filled, that is so much easier than decoding all the bits that need to be set to when “done by hand.”

This could be the case where software can rescue the MCU designer from ever-more complex hardware. If we are lucky, the MCU manufacturers will see which modes and settings are the most often used and create a standard “simple” version of a peripheral driver that can work with multiple manufacturers’ MCUs. That would simplify things even more, but I’m not holding my breath.

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Warren Miller has more than 30 years of experience in electronics and has held a variety of positions in engineering, applications, strategic marketing, and product planning with large electronics companies like Advanced Micro Devices, Actel, and Avnet, as well as with a variety of smaller startups. He has in-depth experience of programmable devices (PLDs, FPGAs, MCUs, and ASICs) in industrial, networking, and consumer applications and holds several device patents.