Introduction

A single-board microcontroller is a microcontroller built onto a single printed circuit board. This board provides all of the circuitry necessary for a useful control task: microprocessor, I/O circuits, clock generator, RAM, stored program memory and any support ICs necessary. The intention is that the board is immediately useful to an application developer, without them needing to spend time and effort in developing the controller hardware.

As they are usually low-cost hardware, and have an especially low capital cost for development, single-board microcontrollers have long been popular in education. They are also a popular means for developers to gain hands-on experience with a new processor family.

References

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_microcontroller