[sdiy] Now what?!?! AVR, PIC, or Scenix SX?

[J.D.McEachin]

At 11:56 AM 11/17/01 +0100, Synthusiast wrote:

>Check out Atmel's 8051 architecture series here:
>http://www.atmel.com/atmel/products/prod20.htm
>I've been using the AT89S53 (12K Flash, ISP interface) happily for quite a
>bit of time. Only drawback I found is that it's still quite slow in general
>due to the typical MCS-51 built-in clock dividing circuitry...

I'm partial to the 8051 series too.  My long labor of love (Europa, which has FINALLY shipped, BTW), uses a 40 pin DIP compatible TEMIC (Atmel) part which has a 2x clock, an extra DPTR register, and most importantly, 64k of FLASH which is serially programmable.  However, for my next project, I'm taking a serious look at a CYGNAL 8051 compatible that has a lot more features and horsepower.

The Cygnal parts are 8051 compatible, but run 1 cycle per clock , for 12x the performance of a typical 8051 at the same freq. 5 timers, AtoD, DtoA, an internal clock (no XTAL needed), additional I/O ports, 64K of internal flash and over 4K of RAM. Bummer they aren't available in DIP 40 form.

This Dev kit comes with a debugger and JTAG interface so you can do source level debugging and download the code right to it to debug it.  Breakpoints, Watchpoints, etc... are all available, and all pins on the
part are brought out to a header so you can wire it up to whatever you want.

The debugger can read .OBJ files generated from the Keil compiler/assembler so you can do all debugging and recompilation from their little development environment.

The dev kit is a bargain at US$135 including shipping.  See https://www.cygnal.com/products/c8051f020dk.htm

JDM