Upgrading tot the 68HCI2 16-bit microcontroller (2)

Having dealt with the hardware in Part 1 of the HC12 article, we now turn our attention to a summary of how to program the HC12, along with a look at the necessary tools.The HC12 is a typical CISC microcontroller, which means that it has a relatively large number of instructions with relatively complex modes of operation. In general, this type of microcontroller is easier to program in assembly language than are representatives of the RISC camp. The latter type (necessarily) induces the generation of ‘spaghetti code’, which consists of long and correspondingly incomprehensible code sequences. This does not have to be a disadvantage, as long as the code generation is left to a compiler. However, since we want to start with assembly language, the HC12 is just what we need.