Intel 80186
16-bit microcontroller
The Intel 80186, also known as the iAPX 186, or just 186, is a microprocessor and microcontroller introduced in 1982. It is based on the Intel 8086 and, like it, has a 16-bit external data bus multiplexed with a 20-bit address bus. The 80188 is a variant with an 8-bit external data bus.
Description
The 80186 series was designed to reduce the number of integrated circuits required. It included features such as clock generator, interrupt controller, timers, wait state generator, DMA channels, and external chip select lines. It was used in numerous embedded systems, as microcontrollers with external memory.
The initial clock rate of the 80186 was 6 MHz, but due to more hardware available for the microcode to use, especially for address calculation, many individual instructions completed in fewer clock cycles than on an 8086 at the same clock frequency. For instance, the common register+immediate addressing mode was significantly faster than on the 8086, especially when a memory location was both (one of) the operand(s) and the destination. Multiply and divide also showed great improvement, being several times as fast as on the original 8086, and multi-bit shifts were done almost four times as quickly as in the 8086.
A few new instructions were introduced with the 80186 (referred to as the 8086-2 instruction set in some datasheets): enter/leave (replacing several instructions when handling stack frames), pusha/popa (push/pop all general registers), bound (check array index against bounds), and ins/outs (input/output of string).
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This entry incorporates text from “Intel 80186” 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.