Crossware Enhances 8051 Suite with Support for Silicon Labs’ C8051F7xx High Pin-Count, Touch-Sensing Chips

Alan Harry, Crossware’s CEO, said: The improvements to the Crossware 8051 suite enable developers to rapidly exploit the advanced features of these new chips by providing a combination of wizards, simulation, debugging, compiler extensions and pre-configuration. Together, these enhancements allow programmers using the C8051F7xx chips to accelerate the development process and significantly reduce new product time-to-market.

Crossware’s code creation wizards are provided for all on-chip peripherals and are able to generate configuration code, interrupt routines and application code. The simulator simulates the 8051 core itself as well as many of the on-chip peripherals. This allows a developer to use the simulator to immediately test the code created using the wizards. The simulator can also be extended using the Virtual Workshop Interface allowing developers to construct a simulation of their complete target system.

Switching to on-chip debugging allows the developer to exploit the debugging capabilities integrated into the C8051F7xx chips and run programs interactively on the target hardware.

The code creation wizards have been used to create some simple examples that demonstrate the use of the touch sensor, ADC and comparator on-chip peripherals and these will run on the F700 Toolstick evaluation board from Silicon Laboratories.

With its advanced C compiler, libraries, wizards, simulator and debugger, the Crossware 8051 Development Suite provides a complete and extremely user friendly development environment for the Silicon Labs’ family of microcontrollers.

A Silicon Labs-specific evaluation version of the Crossware 8051 Development Suite is included on the Third Party Tools and Documentation CD supplied with the Silicon Labs MCU Development Kits - a full version of this is now available from Crossware for developers who do not require support for 8051 chips from other vendors.