The 8088 Microprocessor Architecture | Pin Diagram

The 8088 Microprocessor Architecture – Before the 8086 microprocessor, most circuits were designed around the 8-bit 8085 microprocessor. After the introduction of 8086, there was a search for a microprocessor that had the programming flexibility of 8086 and an external interface like 8085. The microprocessor 8088 was a result of this demand.

The 8088 microprocessor has all the programming functions and hardware features that the 8086 microprocessor has, and all the peripheral interfacing schemes that the 8085 microprocessor has. The 8088 microprocessor has an 8-bit data bus and a 20-bit address bus.

Architecture of the 8088 Microprocessor

The architecture of 8088 is similar to 8086 except for two changes:

1. 8088 has a four-byte instruction queue.
2. 8088 has a bit data bus.

The block diagram and architecture of the 8088 microprocessor are shown in Figure 1.

The addressing capability of the 8088 is 1M byte, and it needs 20 address lines. The 8088 microprocessor has an 8-bit data bus, so it can access only one byte at a time. This results in the operation speed being slow compared to the 8086 microprocessor. However, the 8088 microprocessor can process 16-bit data internally.

The pin diagram of the 8088 microprocessor is shown in Figure 2. Most of the 8088 pins and their functions are exactly similar to the corresponding pins of 8086, with the difference that the data bus is just 8 bits, the SS₀ pin is introduced instead of the BHE pin, and IO/M pin instead of M/IO pin.