Transistor count of common uCs?

Hello,

Nowadays one often hears/readers about the transistor count of modern CPUs and GPUs. But what's the transistor count of common uCs like the Microchip PIC, Atmel AVR or similar microcontrollers? Just being curious :-) Thank you in advance! Regards, johannes

Reply to
johannes m.r.
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The complexity is usually not specified as the number of transistors but as number of gates, as a gate is the smallest entity of design languages like Verilog or VHDL (usually...).

32-bit microcontrollers use something like 50~100k gates, not counting any memory. I would guess that a PIC needs well below 10kG and the AVR a little bit more. But that is a very rough estimation. In the usual implementations a gate consists of four transistors on average, so you might multiply the above figures by four to get an approximate number of transistors. For SRAM you should add four to six transistors per bit, for Flash or ROM it is in the order of one transistor per bit. Btw, semiconductor companies calculate cost in mm*mm, at least as a first approximation for mature processes, not in number of transistors or gates.

Michael

Reply to
Michael Kr?mer

The 8080 microprocessor back in 1975 had less than 5000 transistors whereas the 2.2 GHz Pentium IV using .13 micron technology had about 42 million and some graphics processors have considerably more (the ATI 9700 had about 110 million). High end processors today are pushing 500 million transistors and expected to hit 1 billion by 2005 to 2006. The transistor count has been growing by about

40% per year.

In contrast, the RISC processor, PowerPC 401 has only about 85000 transistors.

Microcontrollers are generally less complex than microprocessors and often have the RICS architecture (even though they do have more peripherals integrated onto the chip) so I would guess they fall in the 100,000 transistors range although I haven't seen actual numbers published.

Ref:

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Jerry

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Reply to
Jerry Petrey

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Reply to
Ulf Samuelsson

Interesting. Do these numbers include peripherals or are they just for the core CPU?

Cheers, Jon

Reply to
Jon Beniston

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