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ARE YOUR CYGNALS CROSSED?

Taking a Look at Cygnal's C8051F000
by Fred Eady

Start ý Searching for a Cygnal ý Whatýs in There, Anyway? ý Off to See the Wizard ý Thereýs No Place Like Home ý Mixed Cygnals ý Birds of a Featherý ý Tuning In ý Sources and PDF

SEARCHING FOR A CYGNAL

Youýre just a URL and a click away from any Cygnal MCU or development kit you desire to own. Because this was my first foray into Cygnal MCU airspace, the C8051F000 Development Kit was a good pick. I really didnýt have much of a choice in any case, as that was the only Cygnal SDK in the Florida-room SBC inventory. With that, letýs open the little white box together and check out its signals.

Iým normally not the "read me first" kind of guy, but in this case, I decided maybe that would be a prudent move. A quick look at the target board did little for me, as I discovered that the silk screen for the I/O pins didnýt exist. The rest of the contents of the box contained a JTAG adapter that the documentation called an emulation cartridge, a serial cable, a wall transformer, and a uniquely labeled Cygnal CD-ROM.

Now I know why there was an exclamation mark with the read-me message. After reading about what the target board would and would not do, I came upon the pin outs for the I/O headers. The last page before the schematic informed me that the four-position analog barrier strip on my version of the target board was silk-screened incorrectly. My immediate thought was that maybe them not silk-screening the 64-pin I/O connector was a good thing after all. The good news is that none of the admitted shortcomings of the development kit were showstoppers and sure to be fixed in newer versions of the software development kit (SDK). My development kit target board and emulation cartridge are shown on the Florida-room programming bench in Photo 1.

Photo 1ýI wanted to show you the innards of the emulation cartridge, but the plastic enclosure halves didnýt want to separate cleanly with the circuitry inside the cartridge. So, I decided it might be better to show it to you working as a single piece than not working in many pieces.

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