3 ms·

It's astonishing how many places the 8051 shows up. Got an in-car Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS)? It's almost certainly an 8051. Getting accurate shi

• duskwuff 3y ago
  > Getting accurate shipment numbers (without paying for the reports) is hard And even those reports are likely to involve a lot of guesswork. There are probably hundreds of different 8051-class IP cores, and a nontrivial number of them are royalty-free -- even the designers of those cores may not know how many chips they've been used in. Many 8051 cores aren't even fully acknowledged by the IC manufacturer -- it's not uncommon for one to be described as vaguely as an "8-bit RISC microprocessor", especially when it's being used in an application where the firmware is embedded in the part (like a USB hub controller or a battery charge controller).
  • kjs3 3y ago
    Completely accurate, particularly around the "don't tell them it's an 8051" clones. I have a friend that used to reverse engineers all sorts of embedded black box products and he's said "when there's no markings or other clues, assume it's some kind of 8051 and see where you get". That might not be as true these days with ubiquitous ARMs and sub 10 cent Chinese/Taiwanese microcontrollers (many apparently PIC12 knockoffs[1]), but it apparently worked for a long time. [1] https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2019/08/12/the-terrible-3-cent-mcu/ https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2019/08/12/the-terrible-3-cent...