At the introduction of the 12,000 gate 32bit ARM Cortex M0 recently, an ARM spokesman told EW the M0 was close to the 10,000 gates normally occupied by the 8bit 8051 microcontroller. Inspired by this, ...

This paper describes the design and implementation of a version of the 8051 microcontroller, one of the most commercially used microcontrollers in FPGA with reconfigurable instruction set.

Editor's Note: View the Fundamentals of Microcontrollers to catch up on the architectural differences, selection, set up and programming of today's micros. To work through the thicket of choices, it's ...

Although 8051-compatible microcontrollers with SPI ports are available, a lower-cost device with an SPI port bit-banged through GPIO pins often suffices. The code shown here takes advantage of ...