Evatronix R8051XC Microcontroller Now Fully Supported by Keil 8051 Professional Developer’s Kit (PK 51)

Bielsko-Biala & Gliwice, Poland, 29th November 2006- Evatronix SA, the silicon Intellectual Property (IP) provider in Poland has partnered with Keil™, an ARM® company, to extend the Keil 8051 Professional Developer’s Kit (PK51), with an extensive support for the Evatronix high-speed configurable 8-bit R8051XC microcontroller core. Keil is a market leader in software development tools for the 8051- and ARM-based microcontrollers.

The enhancements to the Keil PK51 toolchain enable embedded software developers to make full use of the Evatronix R8051XC advanced features with regard to the code generated by Keil C compiler. They bringing also increased efficiencies to the development process.

“The PK51 C compiler now supports R8051XC architectural features as optional 16-bit multiplication/division unit or multiple data pointers, that may be configured as single, 1, 2 or 4 pairs, according to the target application. The R8051XC achieves extremely high performance rates due to its pipelined architecture combined with effective support for all its advanced features by the Keil compiler. The Dhrystone 2.1 test indicates that R8051XC reaches 0,0898 DMIPS/MHz versus 0,0094 DMIPS/MHz for original 80C51 architecture. It is 8.8% better than the previous version,” said Rafal Gardas, the software design engineer at Evatronix.

“The Evatronix R8051XC is a great step forward for low cost, high performance microcontroller IP core implementation,” said Reinhard Keil, director of MCU tools at Keil. “It is flexible enough for the most demanding 8-bit applications and is fully supported in the Keil µVision environment.”

The instruction set simulator combined into the PK51 environment reflects fully R8051XC instruction timing as well as behaviour of the rich configurable set of R8051XC peripheral devices (including I2C and SPI controllers). This allows the programmers to develop the code and debug it using the µVision debugger before the actual hardware is available, and still accurately determine the achievable final device performance.

The R8051XC microcontroller core can be integrated with the On Chip Debug Support (OCDS) unit which is interfaced to the Keil µVison debugger with a hardware box, the Evatronix Debug Puck (EDP) and a software plug-in, the Evatronix Debug Interface version 2.0 (EDIk51-2, for Keil PK51 tools). The EDP interacts with the host PC over a USB link and drives directly JTAG interface to the OCDS unit of the R8051XC core embedded in a target system.

“The extended PK51 toolchain now supports the R8051XC core, and the accompanying Evatronix software allows designers to reduce embedded software development time and gain additional chip performance for their applications,” added Wojciech Sakowski, Evatronix president and chief strategy officer.

Availablity

The PK51 demo package is available as a free download at KEIL web site, enabling users to verify the software simulator the difference between R8051XC efficiency versus typical 80C51 processors. The R8051XC configurable microcontroller core is delivered either as Verilog or VHDL source code with HDL verification environment, simulation and synthesis support scripts to verify and implement the processor in ASIC or FPGA technology. For evaluation purpose Evatronix also provides netlists for selected FPGA family together with evaluation boards.

About Keil

Keil, an ARM® company, makes C compilers, macro assemblers, real-time kernels, debuggers, simulators, integrated environments and evaluation boards for ARM7/ARM9™/Cortex-M3™, XC16x/C16x/ST10, 251 and 8051 processor-based microcontroller families. Products available from Keil include embedded development tools, evaluation software, product updates, application notes, example code and technical support. More information on Keil is available at www.keil.com