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assemblyavratmega16

Is ATmega32 8-bit or 16-bit?

Is ATmega32 an 8-bit or 16-bit microcontroller?

While reading Mazidi's AVR book it was stated that RAMEND in ATmega32 is at 0x085f which is a 16-bit address. Extract from the book here.

Solution

  • The cpu is 8-bit, because the general purpose registers are 8-bit registers.

    There are some 16-bit registers, e.g., the stack pointer SP, and the program counter PC. But they have to be larger because the address space is more than 256 bytes long.

    We still say the cpu is 8-bit because the general purpose registers perform 8-bit operations.