Maxim Integrated High-Speed Microcontroller User Manual
Page 174
High-Speed Microcontroller User’s Guide
Rev: 062210
174 of 176
18. MICROCONTROLLER DEVELOPMENT SUPPORT
18.1 Technical Support
18.2 Development Tools
Because the high-speed microcontroller family was designed for maximum compatibility with existing
8051 microcontrollers, users find that most of their existing 8051 tools work with our products.
18.3 Software Compatibility
Maxim microcontrollers execute the 8051 instruction set and are object code compatible with other 8051-
based products. The special features of Maxim microcontrollers are accessed via SFRs unique to our
products, but the devices do not use any new instructions. The new SFRs can be easily defined in the
user’s software with EQUATE statements or in a setup file. Once defined, these new SFRs receive the
same treatment as any of the original 8051 registers. This means that Maxim microcontrollers are
compatible with almost every 8051-based software tool available.
18.4 High-Level Language Compilers
Like assemblers, compilers must be informed of the existence and location of the SFRs unique to Maxim
microcontrollers. When using C, it is commonly necessary to identify the starting address for various
read/write segments such as XDATA and Stack. In addition, it is recommended that the large memory
model be used in conjunction with C compilers. This places the stack in off-chip SRAM. Microcontroller
systems usually have an abundance of such SRAM compared to ROM-based systems. While off-chip
stack results in slower execution time, the stack size becomes virtually unlimited.
To aid our customers, Maxim maintains a list of development tool vendors on its website at
page is
very useful when attempting to locate commonly used microcontroller aids such as compilers, test clips,
sockets, programmers, programming adapters, reference books, emulators, crystals and development boards.