I attended the Embedded Systems Conference, and searched for signs that the 8051 was still there. Here is what I found from the 8051 vendors.

Intel

They had a huge presence complete with a OCC chopper with a quad Pentium controlled dash board. But no word about 8051s, which is not surprising since they announced their discontinuation last year.

NXP

NXP also had a huge booth, which was devoted to selling ARM processors. I could not find a single mention of the 8051 processor line.

ST

Another huge booth pushing ARM processors. They even exhibited an ARM powered toy truck which drove in circles. One of their posters referenced “8-bit MCU” as a product.

Atmel

Atmel was featuring the AVR processors. I did not see a mention of the 8051 line.

SST

SST was mainly selling memories. I did find a one page reference to the 8051 in their literature section.

Silicon Labs

Silicon Labs was pushing their 8051 chips and development systems. I did find out that they did not approve of their chips being called deviates. And they have a point, since you can only deviate from the norm, and looking around the show, they were the 8051 norm!

New (at least to me) was an 8051 with EPROM instead of Flash. This was done to provide an ultra low cost chip.

Tekmos (Shameless Self Plug)

We were pushing the 83C751, the 87C751, and announcing our new 89C668. Unfortunately, no one seemed to care. The main comment we got was “Oh, are they still making 8051s?”

Keil

While not a vendor, Keil at least mentioned their 8051 tools. Their main thrust was ARM tools though.


I haven’t felt this out of date since I attended one of my kid’s school dances. Even Erik is using AVRs these days.