Extremely popular microcontroller manufactured by Microchip Technology Inc. based around their PIC architecture. The heart of the 16x8x series is a Harvard architecture core with a 33 instruction RISC ISA, 14 bit instruction wordsize and an 8-bit data bus. The '84 is a hobbyist's dream because it has 1K of built-in nonvolatile program memory and a simple and inexpensive method of code downloading. Programming hardware for the PICs can often be built from junk box sweepings.