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ARE YOUR CYGNALS CROSSED?

Taking a Look at Cygnal's C8051F000
by Fred Eady

Start ı Searching for a Cygnal ı Whatıs in There, Anyway? ı Off to See the Wizard ı Thereıs No Place Like Home ı Mixed Cygnals ı Birds of a Featherı ı Tuning In ı Sources and PDF

I can still recall graduating from writing code for 8748s and 8749s to the more refined 8751 many years ago. The 8751 was much faster (with a 12-MHz clock) and included on-chip hardware peripherals like a UART and a capture module that I had to emulate in 874x firmware. I was in heaven, or at least I thought I was.

Today, my teenage kids use cell phones, PDAs, and computers like they were born with them attached. At 16 years of age, I would have killed for a simple graphing scientific calculator. I remember going to my EE lab to use what was probably at that time a very expensive Hewlett Packard plotting calculator that was about the size of todayıs desktop PC. Now, you can buy graphing calculators that run circles and arcs around that old HP from drug stores and discount outlets for what my kids call pocket change. Todayıs children arenıt anything like I was at their age, and likewise for todayıs 8051 family of MCUs.

There are hundreds of 8051 variants out there, and if you look around, you can still buy the original as a refurbished pull from many distributors. Unless youıre an antique dealer or you have a I-canıt do-without-it gadget that uses the 8051, the original 8751 (the windowed EPROM version of an 8051) is of little or no value in terms of computing ability today. For about the same amount of money, you can buy a new Cygnal C8051F000 that runs the same native 8051 instruction set only many times faster than the original 8051, consumes less than one tenth of the power of the original ceramic monster, and throws in a pool of peripherals that would overwhelm the 40 pins of the old 8751.

To add insult to injury, the C8051F000 doesnıt need a separate programmer, an EPROM eraser, or an in-circuit emulator (ICE). Why? Because of the F that follows 8051 in the Cygnal part number. The F stands for flash, as in flash memory. Being flash memory-based, the C8051F000 can be programmed and reprogrammed a minimum of 10,000 times without ever seeing the ultraviolet rays of an EPROM eraser. And for less than $100, the Cygnal C8051F000 Development Kit provides a means of debugging the C8051F000 MCU without having to rely on the services of the ICE.

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