The PIC12C5XX from Microchip Technology is a family of low-cost, high performance, 8-bit, fully static, EEPROM/EPROM/ROM-based CMOS microcontrollers. It employs a RISC architecture with only 33 single word/single cycle instructions. All instructions are single cycle (1 µs) except for program branches which take two cycles. The PIC12C5XX delivers performance an order of magnitude higher than its competitors in the same price category. The 12-bit wide instructions are highly symmetrical resulting in 2:1 code compression over other 8-bit microcontrollers in its class. The easy to use and easy to remember instruction set reduces development time significantly.