EnSilica declares ‘Open Season’ on the 8051

“We have declared ‘Open Season’ on the 8051,” said David Wheeler, Technical Director of EnSilica. “Where a small and relatively inexpensive processor is required, the 8051 is probably still the most popular choice. However, the eSi-1600 offers considerable additional benefits over even the most optimised 8051, particularly in terms of low power and silicon area which are so important in today’s competitive marketplace. What’s more, the eSi-1600 soft processor core delivers these additional benefits at a very competitive price.”

EnSilica’s eSi-1600 provides 65 times the performance of the original 8051 (Dhrystone DMIPs/MHz) and more than 5 times the performance of the fastest, enhanced 8051. This allows the clock to be disabled for 80% of the time relative to an 8051, delivering significant power savings. Comparing the Dhrystone kernel size, the eSi-1600’s mixed 16/32-bit instruction set occupies only 60% of the code size required by the 8051, providing substantial savings in silicon area and power associated with the program memory. The eSi-1600’s core size of just 8.5k gates is more than a match for even the most optimised 8051.

“This offer to match their licensee fee gives 8051 users a truly compelling reason to reconsider their processor options and migrate to the silicon-proven eSi-1600,” commented Ian Lankshear, Managing Director of EnSilica. “The 8051 has been a real work-horse of the electronics industry but it cannot compete with the eSi-1600 in terms of low power, silicon area and scalability. EnSilica's eSi-RISC family of soft processor cores for embedded systems is unique in being the only processor architecture scalable from 16 bits to 32 bits, enabling companies to secure their software investment.”