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C166 family

Family of 16-bit microcontrollers

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 2, 2025
Entity authorityQ1022631 ↗
Source-derived summary

The C166 family is a 16-bit microcontroller architecture from Infineon (formerly the semiconductor division of Siemens) in cooperation with STMicroelectronics. It was first released in 1990 and is a controller for measurement and control tasks. It uses the well-established RISC architecture, but features some microcontroller-specific extensions such as bit-addressable memory and an interrupt system optimized for low-latency. When this architecture was introduced the main focus was to replace 8051 controllers (from Intel).

Opcode-compatible successors of the C166 family are the C167 family, XC167 family, the XE2000 family and the XE166 family.

As of 2017, microcontrollers using the C166 architecture are still being manufactured by NIIET in Voronezh, Russia, as part of the 1887 series of integrated circuits. This includes a radiation-hardened device under the designation 1887VE6T (Russian: 1887ВЕ6Т).

C167 / ST10 family

The Siemens/Infineon C167 family or STMicroelectronics ST10 family is a further development of the C166 family. It has improved addressing modes and support for "atomic" instructions. Variants include, for example, Controller Area Network (CAN bus).

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “C166 family” is family of 16-bit microcontrollers. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through C166, family and Family, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1990, 2017, 1887—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, C166, family and Family is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “family of 16-bit microcontrollers” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1022631. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1990, 2017 and 1887.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “C166 family” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.