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The PICmicro® microcontroller (MCU) was first introduced around 1980 as their "Peripheral Interface Controller" (and became commonly known as the "PIC") by General Instruments for use in their product designs. The microcontroller the engineers came up with had quite an unusual processor architecture and was ideally suited for many microcontroller applications. The processor architecture offered many advantages over the Motorola 6805s and Intel 8051s that were the microcontrollers of choice at the time.
In the late 1980s, General Instruments "spun off" their chip manufacturing plants as "Microchip", which has supported the PICmicro microcontroller line along with other products.
I have been working with the PICmicro microcontroller (it is also commonly known as the "PIC") for over seven years now and I am continually amazed at it's capabilities and usefulness in simple applications. Microchip has continually added new device part numbers to the lineup and the PICmicro microcontroller is now one of the most complete and full-featured microcontroller families available on the market. The device has found it's way into innovative products such as Parallax's "Basic Stamp".
Microchip has always been on the leading edge for people to get involved with and learn the PICmicro microcontroller with a minimum investment of time and money. The most popular beginner's microcontroller is the PICmicro 16F84, which uses Flash Program Memory and has programming requirements that make it very easy for the new user or hobbyist to build their own programmer with little more than a PC and some common discrete parts (an example of which is my "El Cheapo" Programmer.
I am expecting the new chip of choice to become the PIC16F62X or PIC16F87X which have the ability to read and write their own program memory. My "EMU-II" Emulator/Debugger is an example of what can be done with these new PICmicro microcontrollers.
Microchip's MPLAB® IDE is one of the best Integrated Development Environments ("IDE") available for any microcontroller and it is free. This ease of getting into the PICmicro MCU is unmatched by anyone else in the industry. The MPLAB application can be downloaded from Microchip's web site.
The PICmicro microcontroller is built around a "Harvard Architecture" processor and may be somewhat difficult to understand if you have been taught with "Princeton Architectures" (which are also known as "Von Neumann Architectures"). Before you begin attempting to develop your own applications, I recommend that you take a look at a book like "Programming and Customizing PICmicro® Microcontrollers" that I have written to help introduce the PICmicro MCU to new users and help them develop their own applications.
One of the really nice features of the PICmicro microcontroller is the large amount of support that you can find over the Internet. I, along with most people, have found Microchip and their representatives all over the world to be helpful and willing to go the extra mile to help their customers. This has been shown in Microchip's jump from number twenty to the second highest producer of microcontrollers by volume. As well, there are a number of PICmicro microcontroller specific listservers and usergroups available on the Internet and a fairly large number of books (including mine) to help new users learn more about the PICmicro MCU and to share ideas and projects.
If you are new to the PICmicro microcontroller or if you are looking for resources, please prowl around my web page for a bit and see what you can find. I have tried to provide projects and information that is not available elsewhere on the web for the PICmicro MCU as well as links to some of the best PICmicro microcontroller reference pages I have found.