Industry Expert Blogs

The widespread deployment of MEMS in smart phones has ancillary benefits that I thought worth looking into. One of these was breathing new life into 8-bit processors.  I began my search by calling Hal Barbour. He’s the CEO of CAST, Inc. a company that has made a business offering a range of popular and standards-based IP cores including the venerable 8051.  His COO, Nikos Zervas, joined the call as well.

The question I had for the two of them was the roll that the 8051 had in the development of the smart sensors going into smart phones, automobiles and Internet of Things. I picked the 8051 because of my past association with the processor while at my old company ARC International. One of the growing markets for ARC was in 8051 replacements and one of the company’s successes was displacing the 8051 in USB drive controllers.

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