What is 8051 Microcontroller ?

A Microcontroller can be defined as a compact and integrated circuit that is designed to govern over any specific operation in the embedded system. These are found in robots, vehicles, medical devices, office machines, mobile radio transceivers, vending machines as well as home appliances. A microcontroller is a made up of a memory, processor and I/O peripherals.

8051 Microcontroller designed by Intel in the year 1981 is an 8-bit Microcontroller. It is having 4kb of ROM, 40 pins DIP and 128 bytes of Ram along with two 16-bit timers. There are four parallel ports of 8-bit in this Microcontroller which helps in meeting the requirements related to the addressing and programming. The crystal frequency of this 8051 Microcontroller is 12 MHz. The function of this microcontroller is to connect the supported devices to the CPU. With the system bus of this microcontroller all devices like data memory, program memory, interrupt control, ports, serial interface, and timers are interfaced. It also possesses a clock circuit.