Evatronix Releases Updates to R8051XC Microcontroller Cores

Gliwice & Bielsko-Biala, Poland, July 25th, 2006 - Evatronix S.A., the silicon Intellectual Property (IP) provider, has announced technical updates to its R8051XC microprocessor cores used in a wide range of applications including wireless transmission control chips (supporting ZigBee or Bluetooth protocols), industrial automation applications, off-the-shelf microcontrollers, flash-based storage devices and household appliances.

“The new R8051XC feature set was inspired by customers using our R8051 and R80515 cores, in more than one hundred chip designs, enabling us to add specific enhancements critical to their applications,” said Wojciech Sakowski, Evatronix president and chief strategy officer. “We have gained increases in overall performance by reusing its CPU architecture and also increases in achievable clock frequency, benchmarked at 8.2 times better than the standard Intel 8051 architecture working at the same frequency - plus we can deliver further silicon savings by optimizing CPU instructions.”

The R8051XC cores also now support SPI and I2C interfaces, and on-chip debugging support for the processor is now configurable. The customer may instantiate either the Evatronix proprietary On-Chip Debug Support (OCDS) solution interfaced by a software plug-in to Keil software development tools or the On-Chip Instrumentation (OCI) circuitry from First Silicon Solutions (FS2). Both are configurable allowing trade-off between complexity and debug support.

“The quality of our IP cores results from our commitment to continuous improvements of the design and verification procedures. These procedures are controlled by our quality management system certified for compliance with the ISO 9001:2000 standard,” said Miroslaw Bandzerewicz, Evatronix chief quality manager. “The verification process was very extensive due to the configurability of this core. In theory 50 millions legal configurations are possible but by simulating just 107 configurations we achieved full code coverage,” Bandzerewicz concluded.

Availability

The R8051XC can be delivered either as a fully configurable core that includes all options and the configurator (this solution is targeted at multi-project license configurations and ASIC/OEM partners), or in one of the three standard configurations: the CPU-only, and R8051- and R80515-equivalent versions (R8051X-A and R8051X-B respectively). Customers may also specify and receive any non-standard configuration that meets their particular needs. Evatronix IP cores are available worldwide through the sales channels of its strategic distribution partner CAST, Inc. (New Jersey, USA). In the EU countries (excluding UK) Evatronix also operates a direct sales channel.