The invention of the microprocessor was a milestone in the introduction of the microcontroller. The first microprocessor was pioneered in 1971 by Intel. It was the 4-bit microprocessor with a clock speed of 740 Khz. It is known as the Intel 4004 and the first commercial CPU on a single chip.

Three years later, Intel had manufactured the 8-bit Intel 8080 microprocessor. It was considered by many to be the first true general-purpose microprocessor used. It has been used in various applications such as traffic lights and cash registers. The Altair 8800 was one of the first computers to also use the microprocessor.

The complexities of the microprocessor had led to the introduction of the microcontroller. In order to use the microprocessor, it is necessary to add other external components, such as memory, input port and output port. However, the microcontroller combined the CPU, memory, peripheral, input-output function, and analog-to-digital converter on a single chip.

The year of 1976 was significant in the history of microcontrollers. Intel had invented the world’s first microcontroller. The microcontrollers were Intel 8048 and Intel 8748. Since then the uses of microcontrollers increased every year with dozens of vendors. Common vendors today were Intel, Freescale, Microchip, ARM, and Atmel.

In 1993, the introduction of EEPROM increased Microchip’s sales with its famous PIC16C84 chip. It is allowed to erase the memory electronically and quickly. This electrically erasable memory made it cost less than the CPU which required a quartz “erase window” to erase the EPROM.

Later, the PIC16F84 was introduced due to the replacement of EEEPROM with flash memory. As it was affected, the cost of the single chip plummeted over time. In 2009, the cheapest 8-bit microcontroller available costing $0.25 in number of thousands. Microcontrollers today are inexpensive and readily available to hobbyists, with large online communities around certain processors for hobbyists, with large online communities around certain processors.