The PIC16CXX is a family of low-cost, high-performance, CMOS, fully-static, 8-bit microcontrollers.
All PIC16/17 microcontrollers employ an advanced RISC architecture. The PIC16CXX microcontroller family has enhanced core features, eight-level deep stack, and multiple internal and external interrupt sources.
The separate instruction and data buses of the Harvard architecture allow a 14-bit wide instruction word with separate 8-bit wide data. The two stage instruction pipeline allows all instructions to execute in a single cycle, except for program branches (which require two cycles). A total of 35 instructions (reduced instruction set) are available. Additionally, a large register set gives some of the architectural innovations used to achieve a very high performance.
PIC16CXX microcontrollers typically achieve a 2:1 code compression and a 4:1 speed improvement over other 8-bit microcontrollers in their class.