H8 Family

H8 is the name of an extensive family of 8 -bit and 16 -bit microcontrollers, developed and manufactured by Renesas Technology. The first versions were developed in the 1990s by Hitachi Semiconductor and are now being further developed by Renesas Technology, the outsourced semiconductor region from Hitachi.

The H8 family comprises H8/300, H8/300H, H8/500, H8S and H8SX series, with many different versions, each of them with different characteristics, speed variations and an extensive selection of peripherals such as serial I / O ports, different sizes of ROM and flash memory and RAM. The on-chip ROM and flash memory rank in the fields of 16 KB to 1 MB and RAM of 512 bytes to 512 Kbytes.

The original H8 architecture based on the PDP-11 architecture, the DEC PDP-11, eight 16-bit registers ( and the H8/300H H8S have an additional bank of eight 16-bit registers), and extensive addressing. And the families H8/300H H8S also have additional eight 32 -bit registers, each of them can be used as a 32 -bit register, two 16 -bit or two 8 -bit registers to be addressed. Several companies provide external compiler for the H8 family. There is also a port of the GNU Compiler Collection, including an instruction set simulator. In addition, different hardware emulators are available from Renesas and from external providers.

The H8S can also chess computers ( zBTravel champion in 2080 with a program of Frans Morsch ) are found in various digital cameras, printers, controllers, smart cards, industrial control systems and in various automotive subsystems however. So used, for example, LEGO Mindstorms, this architecture ( a version of the H8/300 ).