Silicon Labs offers 8051 spinoffs for automotive applications

C8051Fxx products scale to 50 MIPS

Loring Wirbel, Contributing Editor -- EDN, 11/6/2009 8:35:00 AM

Silicon Labs Inc. has introduced a new family of 8-bit microcontrollers based on the 8051 architecture.  The C8051F5xx series is intended for automotive and industrial applications, and is rated at up to 50 MIPS.  The controllers integrate precision voltage reference, a 5V regulator and on-chip oscillator.  This allows the controller to connect with CAN or local-interconnect bus networks without an external clock.

The speed of the controllers allows them to be used in real-time computations without the use of lookup tables, thus allowing better performance and smaller code size than many 16-bit equivalent architectures.  The controller core can be configured with up to 32 Kbytes of flash memory (8 or 16 on F54x) and up to 2 Kbytes of RAM (1 KB on F54x).  Analog components include a 12-bit A/D converter capable of 200-Ksample/sec operation.

The controllers are available in QFN and QFP packages, qualified to AEC-Q100.  Silicon Labs offeres two development kits, one for the F54x devices, and one for F55x, F56x, and F57x devices.  Price for devices starts at $1.90 each in quantities of 1000, while price of the development kits are $99.00 each.