Microcontrollers (MCUs) have come a long way since their early days. With 4-bit data and all assembly language instructions verbosely described in a handful of pages in the device’s datasheet, the most advanced peripheral was an analog-to-digital converter (ADC), and communication had to be bit-banged over I/O pins.
Today’s 32-bit MCUs with gigabytes of internal program memory storage not only support a wide variety of communication interfaces, but they’re also expected to use those interfaces to provide high-end solutions such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.