To work with Pic microcontroller we should know some background of PIC Family and Comparison between different PIC Families. First of all we should know that PIC was introduced by Microchip and they offer five main families of microcontrollers. For same family there has different of microcontroller with different IC number but all different number of Micro controller shares the same core architecture and instruction set.
The families are identified primarily by the first two digits of the device code. The alphabetic character that follows gives some indication of the technology used. The character ‘C’ between the IC numbers indicates CMOS technology, and the ‘F’ insert indicates incorporation of Flash memory technology, an ‘A’ after the number indicates a technological upgrade on the first issue device. Those five families are given bellow.
- Â 16 Series family
- 16C5X Series family
- 12 Series family
- 17 Series family
- 18 Series family
Comparison between different PIC Families
| PIC family | Stack size | Instructionword size | Number of instructions | Interrupt vectors |
| 12CXXX/12FXXX | 2 | 12- or 14-bit | 33 | None |
| 16C5XX/16F5XX | 2 | 12-bit | 33 | None |
| 16CXXX/16FXXX | 8 | 14-bit | 35 | 1 |
| 17CXXX | 16 | 16-bit | 58, including hardware multiply |
4 |
| 18CXXX/18FXXX | 32 | 16-bit | 75, including hardware multiply |
2 |