Silicon Labs uC

[Strube09]

Has anyone here used the Silicon labs uC?

The rep was just in here and gave me a free Dev kit... Just looking for opinons....

The cool thing for  my industry is that some of their uCs have a boost regulator to operate down to 0.9V... great in the battery world.

I don't know much about the 8051 core.

Thanks

[Bored@Work]

8051 is the dinosaur of cores. If it works for you, fine. But modern is something different.

If you need low-voltage MCU's, others have them, too. E.g. the ATtiny43U has a boost converter for operating down to 0.7 V.

[Strube09]

Yeah, I know they are a very old core... But hey... A free dev kit I won't complain.

[Hypernova]

Unless you code in asm all the time IMO the cores don't matter that much. Of course if you are pushing for more in the same hardware/power envelope then yeah.

[Strube09]

Agreed, I mostly write in C so the core is almost blind to me. Sure I use some inline asm but very rare. Plus I am not doing any real heavy processing so the processing power really isn't that big of deal. I run most of my stuff at around 4MHz which is plenty fast enough. No need to get up to 20MHz.

I guess it will come down to onboard peripherals (which core shouldn't matter) and production qty price.

Unless you code in asm all the time IMO the cores don't matter that much. Of course if you are pushing for more in the same hardware/power envelope then yeah.

[Hypernova]

Agreed, I mostly write in C so the core is almost blind to me. Sure I use some inline asm but very rare. Plus I am not doing any real heavy processing so the processing power really isn't that big of deal. I run most of my stuff at around 4MHz which is plenty fast enough. No need to get up to 20MHz.

I guess it will come down to onboard peripherals (which core shouldn't matter) and production qty price.

Unless you code in asm all the time IMO the cores don't matter that much. Of course if you are pushing for more in the same hardware/power envelope then yeah.

IMO Cypress pretty much has everyone beat in that department, their PSoC's allow you to create any combination of buses you want since it has an onboard FPGA.

And they have whole series of them pared with 8051 cores 

[technovm]

I am using Silocon Labs uC since more than 2 years, and frankly speaking 8051 core is not obsolute. It is still being used in industry today. Silicon Labs offer large range of uC's.