Multibyte Arithmetic In An 8-Bit World

May 25, 2006
Why an 8-bit microcontroller needs more than 8-bit arithmetic: A wide range of control applications uses data with more than 8 bits of precision. Most 8-bit microcontrollers can handle limited, multibyte operations such as addition and subtraction throug

Why an 8-bit microcontroller needs more than 8-bit arithmetic:

A wide range of control applications uses data with more than 8 bits of precision. Most 8-bit microcontrollers can handle limited, multibyte operations such as addition and subtraction through the use of subroutines and the arithmetic unit's carry flag. More complex operations can be built from these. Tradeoffs include performance and code space for the subroutines. Performance tends to be the biggest limiting factor since doubling the number of bytes in an operation typically translates to much more than doubling the execution time. Reducing execution time means moving to multibyte hardware arithmetic units. Some chips have multibyte pointer registers designed to improve memory access, but they tend to have limited arithmetic functionality.

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William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.  

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