An 8051/8052 microcontroller, generally speaking, is any microcontroller that has an instruction set compatible with the MCS-51 standard. Intel made the original 8051 microcontroller back in 1980 and its enhanced version 8052 (with doubled RAM and ROM) in 1983. Since then, dozens of
semiconductor firms have chosen the MCS-51 standard for their lines of microcontrollers. When we speak of "8052" we are not just speaking of the Intel 8052, but also any other microcontroller that is compatible with the 8052 (it's faster then writing 8052-compatible every time we make reference to it), sometimes referring to them as '51
clones.
The marking used by other companies usually contains the "51" or "52" digit-pair, but generally, there are no defined rules for the marking. However, sometimes, the following common points can be found in the marking (don't take these for rules, just as a clue):
- the second digit indicates the type of program memory
- 0 as in 8051 - maskROM
- 7 as in 8751 - EPROM
- 9 as in 89C51 - FLASH
- the third digit is 3 for ROMless versions (i.e. 8031/8032)
- the fourth (and sometimes fifth) letter sometimes indicates the amount of program memory in 4kB, e.g. 89C55 has 5*4kB=20kB FLASH
- if there is one ore more letter(s) between the second and third digit, it indicates
- C - CMOS part (today, all new parts are CMOS, so this gets a bit useless)
- V or L - low voltage (3V) part
- S - serially programmable part
8051
inside
SW model
How to
program (languages)
About
device programming ("burning")
peripherals and communication
lines/buses
clones
51 in
FPGA -
softcores
a few typical
applications and projects
development (debugging) tools -
simulators,
emulators,
monitors, some
debugging ideas
books, links
?