C8051F040/1/2/3/4/5/6/7
1.1. CIP-51™ Microcontroller Core
1.1.1. Fully 8051 Compatible
The C8051F04x family of devices utilizes Silicon Labs' proprietary CIP-51 microcontroller core. The CIP-
51 is fully compatible with the MCS-51™ instruction set; standard 803x/805x assemblers and compilers
can be used to develop software. The core has all the peripherals included with a standard 8052, including
five 16-bit counter/timers, two full-duplex UARTs, 256 bytes of internal RAM, 128 byte Special Function
Register (SFR) address space, and up to 8 byte-wide I/O Ports.
1.1.2. Improved Throughput
The CIP-51 employs a pipelined architecture that greatly increases its instruction throughput over the stan-
dard 8051 architecture. In a standard 8051, all instructions except for MUL and DIV take 12 or 24 system
clock cycles to execute with a maximum system clock of 12-to-24 MHz. By contrast, the CIP-51 core exe-
cutes 70% of its instructions in one or two system clock cycles, with only four instructions taking more than
four system clock cycles.
The CIP-51 has a total of 109 instructions. The table below shows the total number of instructions that
require each execution time.
Clocks to Execute
1
2
2/3
3
3/4
4
4/5
5
8
Number of Instructions 26
50
5
14
7
3
1
2
1
With the CIP-51's maximum system clock at 25 MHz, it has a peak throughput of 25 MIPS. Figure 1.5
shows a comparison of peak throughputs of various 8-bit microcontroller cores with their maximum system
clocks.
25
20
15
10
5
Silicon Labs Microchip Philips ADuC812
CIP-51 PIC17C75x 80C51
8051
(25 MHz clk) (33 MHz clk) (33 MHz clk) (16 MHz clk)
Figure 1.5. Comparison of Peak MCU Execution Speeds
Rev. 1.5
25