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8051 Intellectual Property ("IP")

Intellectual Property / 8051 - the "New Kid" In Town
Hands down the most exciting new development in the 8051 space is the emergence of companies selling "intellectual property" based on the 8051. eg3.com covers the keyword, intellectual property , but suffice it to say whereas in the old days you might be buying a physical chip of the 8051 from Intel, in the New World Order you would be licensing 8051 IP from a vendor like CAST . Where this is really great is in the FPGA area, as the exploding growth of FPGA-based designs (even for actual deployment) meets the established, known architecture of the 8051 with its multi vendor support not just for tools but for IP as well.

8051 IP Vendors
Here are some of the more interesting intellectual property areas to explore for the 8051.

First, as already mentioned, CAST sells 8051 products as does their partner in Europe, Evatronix . You can find out more about the Evatronix products, here . And if you are interested in FPGAs, don't miss the FREE IP download of their 8051 core, here . An example of a deployed product can be found from Tezzaron® Semiconductor , here . Return to CAST and check out their website, as they have other cores as well, as well as some nice documentation on implementation in FPGAs.

Another company very active in the IP space is IPextreme . That company recently acquired the IP portfolio of Mentor Graphics , including their M8055 line. The M8051 lineup consists of four 8051-compatible cores:

• M8051W is a high performance, 2-cycle implementation of the 8051 architecture
• M8051EW is a debug-enhanced version of the M8051W
• M8051 is the classic 12-cycle implementation the 8051 architecture
• M8052 is an enhanced variant of the M8051 with more memory and a 3rd timer
  (Cited here , 25 February 2009).

To find out more about IPExtreme, check out our "Tech Choice" podcast which we recently did with the company here . A few final companies active in 8051 IP are e8051 and Tekmos .

8051 in FPGA Designs
Much of the 8051-based IP will end up in FPGAs at some point. So what are the major FPGA vendors doing to encourage the use of the 8051 in their FPGA-based designs? Actel has really taken the lead here, and has a nice brochure on their 8051 platform in PDF format, here . They also have a fantastic development kit for the 8051, here . The other FPGA vendors are not as aggressive, but Xilinx does have a 2005 white paper on the 8051 IP topic, here, .

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