High-Speed Controller Board (1)

At first glance, the hardware for this project may appear to be pretty hohum: a fairly standard 8051 board, which at most differs from the rest by the absence of an EPROM. The Flash program memory in the microcontroller used here is also not especially radical. But the Dallas Semiconductor DX89C240 is definitely something different: this processor is no less than 12 times faster than the original 8051 at the same crystal frequency, and it can achieve processing speeds of up to 33 MIPS with a clock frequency of 33 MHz!In December 2001 we published a hugely successful design for a microcontroller board using an Atmel Flash microcontroller. This month it’s time to give Dallas Semiconductor a turn. Just more of the same? Yes and no. Yes, this is a Flash microcontroller that bears a strong resemblance to its distant ancestor, the 8051. No, because by modifying the core of the processor to make it much faster and adding various functions to the standard 8051, Dallas has put an 8-bit microcontroller on the market that can easily hold its own against modern16-bitters!