8051 OR arm

There is no simple answer of best. The best device is the MCU that will acomplish your design task at an acceptable price-point.

In the recent past, the notion that if you needed a lot of bit banging you would go with an 8051 type device but now many ARM vendors have made port bit addressing as easy as the 8051.

If you need a little more computing power go with the ARM Cortex-M3 type devices which are compromise cost devices with the 16 bit Thumb-2 instruction set.

Maybe you need even more power, then look at the higher end ARM devices such as the ARM7, ARM9 or ARM11 devices.

Silicon Labs offer and excellent 32 bit device.

So the advice is, determine your requirements, determine the developement tools available and then determine the device that best meets you requirements.

Bradford

There is no simple answer of best. The best device is the MCU that will acomplish your design task at an acceptable price-point.

In the recent past, the notion that if you needed a lot of bit banging you would go with an 8051 type device but now many ARM vendors have made port bit addressing as easy as the 8051.

If you need a little more computing power go with the ARM Cortex-M3 type devices which are compromise cost devices with the 16 bit Thumb-2 instruction set.

Maybe you need even more power, then look at the higher end ARM devices such as the ARM7, ARM9 or ARM11 devices.

Silicon Labs offer and excellent 32 bit device.

So the advice is, determine your requirements, determine the developement tools available and then determine the device that best meets you requirements.

Bradford

thanks
Elico

I'm not so sure about ARM7 as an upgrade for Cortex-M3. I think many of the chip manufacturers sees it as a replacement. The instruction set is 16-bit but it's still a 32-bit core. Just that it can't load 32-bit immediate constants in a single instruction.