Students and professionals who want or need a comprehensive understanding of the operation of the MC68332 microcontroller are the audience for this textbook and reference manual. The MC68332 is essentially an MC68020 surrounded by serial and parallel communications, timing, and system interface circuitry. The text mirrors that structure: it is a textbook on the architecture and assembly language programming of the MC68020, surrounded by additional material (the first two and the last five chapters) on microcontrollers in general, and the other components of this microcontroller in particular.

The first 11 chapters are accessible to the students in an undergraduate architecture course. The first two chapters provide an overview of microcontrollers: their structure, their uses, and strategies for putting them to use. The next seven chapters cover the architecture, instruction set, and assembly language programming of the CPU32 (essentially an MC68020) that lies at the heart of the MC68332. The presentation is quite readable, has good exercises, and is generally comparable to that in other texts on the MC68000 family.

Chapters 10 and 11 treat the CPU32 processor’s states, interrupts, and exceptions, all within the framework of control of the MC68332 microcontroller system. The coherent presentation of the responsibilities of condition handlers and issues in their design make these chapters the best feature of the book.

Chapters 12 through 14 each take up a different non-CPU component of the microcontroller. Because of the complexity of the components involved, the text suddenly becomes much more difficult to follow. These chapters may not reach students in their first course in architecture. The audience that is likely to gain from these chapters is limited to those who have had prior experience with control of simpler external devices or who are highly determined to learn about control of this device.

Finally, chapters 15 and 16 treat development and debugging of real-time applications, and systems that support training and application development on the MC68332.  Motorola  products, such as a small one-card system that is used in many examples throughout the book, are described here.

As a readable text and reference for the MC68332, with a good selection of exercises, references, historical context, and practical tips, the book is excellent. It would also work well as a text in a course on microcontroller architecture for students who already have an architecture background. Students without an architecture background will find much of the text accessible, but as their first contact with device control, this chip may be a bit much to swallow.