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I have been doing research on electronic components off and on for a few months now and one of a handful of things that has thrown me was the difference between integrated circuits and micro controllers. Chat GPT told me that all micro controllers were ic's but not all ic's were micro controllers. At first that can be a bit confusing but repeat that to yourself a few times and it will make sense. I got the same information from you.com.

I understand that, but to get a clearer picture I needed to know the different types of integrated circuits and mcu's. I asked Chat GPT for an exhaustive list and I got what it knew from it's last update in January 2022. I also got a list of ic's

Now it was time to consult some geeks'. For that I did a search on the differences between ic's and mcu's. I am unsure why I did not do this before. Maybe because I got nothing that made sense to me, when I searched youtube. Anyway, I found way more then I could have hoped to find.

Micro Controllers

It has a built in cpu, memory and i/o ports. A timer, ram, rom, and serial ports are also internal. I found this information while looking for visual comparisons to microprocessors since they are similar but different in that a microprocessor is just a cpu and needs external connections to what is built into the micro controller. These chips can be rectangular with an equal number of pins on either side or square with pins on all for sides. The amount of pins is determined by the type and company that makes them.

For the programming of micro controllers it is good to understand what is called low level programming. Something akin to assembly. I got a list of 26+ different low level languages including c, c# fortran and rust. I will try to go more in depth on this subject in a future post.

Integrated Circuits

These chips can look similar in shape and size to the micro controllers but have a more specialized set of skills.
Amplifiers, oscillators, voltage regulators, and timers and counters are just a few examples of integrated circuits. You.com tells me these chips can be reprogrammed but with a bit more difficulty than a micro controller.

Of course the uart and jtag interfaces I mention here is also something I will be attempting to delve deeper into in another post.

I always feel like I am leaving something out when I write posts like this. There is so much to this topic but it is all so fascinating. If you have read this far, I thank you and look forward to engaging with you in the comments.