guide home > 8051 survey results - readers' choice 8051

8051 Survey Results

The 8051 Survey
On the famous television program, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire , one of the options is "poll the audience." In this section, we provide results of our brief, Spring, 2009, poll of 390 total users of the 8051, of which we focus on the 164 commercial users of the 8051. We had 230 students and/or 8051 vendors also take our survey, but we have thrown out those respondents and the data below refers only to the commercial designers employing the 8051.

If you are considering using the 8051 as well as 8051 intellectual property, tools, or boards vendors, these results may help you by "polling the audience." Most importantly, we provide our readers' choice for companies and websites that you should be sure to visit in making your "short list" for 8051 hardware, software, and information sources.

Vertical Industries
What industries are most commonly the targets of 8051 designs? Here is a table showing the percent who indicated that they had recently worked on an 8051 design for a particular industry. Participants could select more than one industry...

Vertical Industry	Percent
Automotive and/or Transportation	28.18%
Mobile / Wireless (cell phone, pda, mobile devices)	16.02%
Computer peripherals	16.02%
Consumer electronics	29.83%
Industrial automation/process control	45.30%
Medical	12.15%
Military and/or Avionics	10.50%
Networking, Communications, and/or Telecom	25.41%
Infrastructure	3.31%
Test and measurement	27.62%

As you can see, the Number One vertical by far is industrial automation and process control with automative, consumer electronics, networking, and test & measurement all in the upper 28% range. The 8051 is clearly broadly used in many vertical industries! This also tells you that the 8051 is a broad-based architecture, and not confined to a niche. Another interesting twist is that even among the commercial users, fully 24% indicated that they also use the 8051 for hobbyist or academic projects; indicating that the 8051 is an architecture that clearly spans the hobbyist, academic, and commercial spheres. One blends into another, so to speak.

8051 Products - What Sorts of Products do Developers Look at?
First of all, what do commercial users of the 8051 typically plan to buy? We asked our readers what sorts of 8051 products that are most likely to be considering to purchase. Here are the results:

There are no real surprises here. 0ver 85% of the commercial users are considering an 8051 microcontroller, with development tools being the second most commonly purchased product at 71%. Software such as real-time operating systems follows, and what is a bit of a surprise is that 44% indicate that they are considering books on the 8051 .

8051 Products & Readers' Shortlists
There are a lot of choices in the 8051 ecosystem among both vendors and websites, so we asked readers to vote on which companies that would most recommend to make their "short lists" to consider for a commercial project. In general, we selected from five to ten choices, and allowed the readers to vote for up to three. This is not a purely scientific poll, but rather as on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? this is food for thought, for you to take a look at these companies and websites when composing your own short list.

In random order, here are the winners of our Readers' Choice awards for the 8051. We recommend that you definitely visit the website of each vendor listed below in any category that is applicable to your 8051 design.

8051 Microcontroller Vendors

• Atmel Corp - Wide range of IC products, including micrcontrollers, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory and radio frequency ('RF') components. Leveraging on a broad intellectual property (IP) portfolio, Atmel is able to provide the electronics industry with complete system solutions. [AVR, 8051, FPSLIC, ARM, DSP, ASIC, Programmable Logic] ...

• Maxim / Dallas - High Performance Microcontrollers for Mixed-Signal Applications, Secure, Network and 8051 Drop-ins. MAXQ: 16-bit Mixed Signal Microcontrollers. Secure: Highest level of security for data-sensitive and financial transaction applications. Networked: Access to a wide variety of networks including Ethernet and CAN. 8051 Drop-ins: Up to 33 times the performance of the original 8051.

• Texas Instruments - Texas Instruments, 8051-based products...

8051 Tools Vendors

• Keil Software - Keil, an ARM® Company, makes C compilers, macro assemblers, real-time kernels, debuggers, simulators, integrated environments, evaluation boards, and emulators for ARM7/ARM9/Cortex-M3, XC16x/C16x/ST10, 251, and 8051 microcontroller families.

• IAR Systems - IAR provides a range of development tools for embedded systems: integrated development environments (IDE) with C/C++ compilers and debuggers, development kits, hardware debug probes and state machine design tools. The product line supports 8051, ARM, AVR, MSP430 and many other 8-, 16-, and 32-bit MCUs from different chip manufacturers. [PowerPAC RTOS for ARM, ColdFire, MSP430]

• Raisonance - Raisonance designs and sells a variety of Microprocessor Development Systems, including Compilers, Simulators, High Level Language Debuggers, Real Time Operating Systems, Integrated Development Environment, Evaluation Boards and In-Circuit Debuggers & Programmers for common market architectures such as 8051, uPSD, ST7, STR7, STR9, ST6, Smart Card products and also tools for Soc.

8051 Intellectual Property ("IP") Vendors

• e8051 Cores - The low-cost e8051 is the fastest available 8051/8052 embedded microcontroller core for ASICs and FPGAs, achieving peak processing speeds of over 300 Mips in ASICs and over 150 Mips in FPGAs (equivalent to 3.6 GHz/1.8 GHz clock rates in a conventional 8051!) The e8051 core has the following features: 100% instruction set compatible with standard 8051 and 8052 microcontrollers, Low gate count/cell count , low power consumption, etc.

• IP Extreme - Brings high-value intellectual property (IP) from large semiconductor companies to consumer and automotive System-on-Chip (SOC) designers worldwide. These products are silicon-proven to minimize design risk and provided in a process independent and EDA neutral format, for easy use by the broadest range of customers. Products offered: AMBA Peripheral Library, Bluetooth Baseband and software, CR-16, ColdFire Processor, FlexRay, 8051, etc.

• Evatronix - Develops electronic virtual components (IP cores) along with complementary software and supporting development environments. and offers electronic design services. The company is also a leading value added reseller of CAD & EDA systems in Poland. Evatronix IP cores are available worldwide through the sales channels of its strategic distribution partner CAST, Inc. (New Jersey, USA). [8051, USB, Embedded Ethernet, FireWire 1394]

Innovative Integration provides board-level hardware products that integrate the best analog I/O and reconfigurable FPGAs to provide cost-effective solutions for challenging data acquisition and signal processing applications.