Dilshan R Jayakody’s Web Log

This is an example application for our " Extend PIC Microcontroller‘s RAM by without using EMI " blog post. In this system PIC16F887 microcontroller is interface with four units of UM61512AK – 64K × 8 CMOS SRAMs. Monitoring signal is supplied to the MCU through “ PORT A ” and all the communications are performing through RS232 interface. In my previous post most of the readers ask me about pure C language routine(s) for memory access. To fulfill that request I rewrite both memory read and write operations using C programming language. Compared with the previous Assembly language routines, only performance glitch in this implementation is 16bit address decoding part (which consume some CPU cycles than assembly language implementation) With this given firmware user can operate this system by without installing any driver software in the host side. All the data capturing and reporting operating are done by MCU itself. Originally I design this data logger to do some photo...

Virtually all PIC microcontrollers have some banking mechanism to extend addressing to additional memory space. But this external data memory is not directly addressable (except in some high versions of PIC18 devices, which include PIC18F8520, PIC18F6620, etc.). In this post we describe easy to implement external memory interface for PIC microcontrollers. Theoretically most of the PIC microcontrollers can use this setup to extend its RAM space. At the prototyping stage we test this system with PIC16F877, PIC16F887, PIC18F4550 and PIC18F4620 microcontrollers. With current setup user may be able to address RAM space up to 192KB. But this can be extended up to 448KB by adding more SRAM modules to the system. In this given schematic we use W24512 – 64K x 8 CMOS SRAMs as a memory modules. 74HC373 latch is used as 8bit to 16bit address extender and 74HC138 demultiplexer is used as memory bank selector. All the files (including source codes, EAGLE schematic files, etc.) of this syste...