Transistor count of common uCs?

[johannes m.r.]

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

[Michael Kr?mer]

> 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?

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

[Jerry Petrey]

"johannes m.r." wrote:

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:
http://www.siliconstrategies.com/article/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=10802738

Jerry
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[Ulf Samuelsson]

"Jerry Petrey @raytheon.com>" <"jdpetrey<NOSPAM> skrev i meddelandet
news:40A11B08...@raytheon.com...

IIRC, The AVR core is 12,000 gates, and the megaAVR core is 20,000 gates
Each gate is 4 transistors. The chip is considerably larger since the memory
uses quite a lot.
The ATmega128 is probably somewhere between 600k-1M transistors.

For comparision:
The AT91R40008 ARM7 micro is probably 2 M transistors.
The ultimate CISC microprocessor, the NS32016 was but 60,000 transistors.

--
Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson u...@a-t-m-e-l.com
This is a personal view which may or may not be
share by my Employer Atmel Nordic AB

[Jon Beniston]

>
> IIRC, The AVR core is 12,000 gates, and the megaAVR core is 20,000 gates
> Each gate is 4 transistors.

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

Cheers,
Jon