1998-11-02 , S/IC-2045/45
Product News From Philips Semiconductors

89C51RC+ and 89C51RD+ devices join the company's growing offerings of flexible, high-performance flash

Philips Semiconductors, the world's third largest provider of non-volatile microcontrollers, today expanded its popular  80C51 family of offerings with two new families of flash in-system programmable (ISP) microcontrollers (MCUs). The 89C51RC+ and 89C51RD+ families operate up to 33 MHz, which make them among the fastest flash 80C51 microcontrollers available in the industry. A superset of the 87C52/54/58, 87C51RA/RB/RC and 87C51FA/FB/FC families, the new devices offer designers more memory than existing solutions for more feature-intensive applications written in higher-level languages such as C.

The 89C51RC+/89C51RD+ MCUs can be programmed and erased many times while installed in the target application, giving designers the flexibility to re-code their microcontrollers at any point during manufacturing and bring products to market faster. Use of the devices can also reduce board space and costs, simplifying code and design.

"Philips Semiconductors remains committed to providing the latest technologies available for customers who seek flexible, high-performance as well as cost-effective solutions," said Geoff Lees, director of marketing for Philips Semiconductors Microcontroller Business Line. "With flash-based microcontrollers that are both multi-time and in-system programmable in parallel or serial mode, we continue to offer a breadth of memory options and derivatives that suit any design need."

The 89C51RC+ and 89C51RD+, with 32K and 64K bytes of flash ISP program memory, respectively, are based on the world's most popular 8-bit architecture, the 80C51. The 89C51RC+ offers 512 bytes of RAM and the 89C51RD+ offers 1024 bytes. Philips Semiconductors' wide variety of flash microcontrollers give designers the ability to upgrade their products immediately through simple software changes, shortening time-to-market and reducing costs by eliminating scrapped inventory. Because the devices are also completely performance compatible with Philips Semiconductors' one-time programmable (OTP), flash and ROM-based microcontrollers, existing customers can move their applications between versions without any degradation or significant change to application performance.

The 89C51RC+ and 89C51RD+ microcontrollers are currently available on a worldwide basis through Philips Semiconductors' sales offices and its extensive distribution network

Philips Semiconductors is the world's leading supplier of the most popular 8-bit architecture, the 80C51, offering more than 100 derivatives. Cahners In-Stat Group, a high-technology market research firm in Scottsdale, Arizona, reported Philips Semiconductors' 80C51 sales of US$ 416 million in 1997, a 42 percent share of the 80C51 8-bit microcontroller market. Philips Semiconductors has recently extended this successful architecture into 16-bit performance with its XA. Now customers can preserve their software, development tools and technology investment in the 80C51 while capitalizing on the 16-bit performance requirements in a market expected to double in the next two years.

Philips Semiconductors, a division of Royal Philips Electronics, headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, is the ninth largest semiconductor supplier in the world and the third largest supplier of discretes in the world. Philips Semiconductors' innovations in digital audio, video, and mobile technology position the company as a leader in the consumer, multimedia and wireless communications markets. Sales offices are located in all major markets around the world and are supported by systems labs.