Selecting 83C154 (8051) replacement

Hi,

If it's a project worth doing, it may well be worth redoing in C, replacing with a completely different chip of your preference. Especially if you have the assembler listing and if it's understandable (some are not that easy, but worth closely examining in case it all makes sense).

It could even be mounted on a small board that could be plugged in to the existing microcontroller socket perhaps, if you're using the original PCBs for the project.

I built a DIY project from an article, that uses an 8051-based chip (8051 core in my case), and it's been a constant irritation because I do not have the development environment set up to easily make modifications to suit my needs over the years. If you intend to share your project with others, they too would appreciate a more modern microcontroller and C code rather than assembler, most likely.

If you're talking about a commercial project, then that's a different matter, you may wish to make as few changes to the code as possible to reduce chance of introducing problems, so then I can understand the need to find a close replacement chip. In one project, I had to do something similar (it wasn't 8051), and the replacement happened to be in a different package, so as well as the code changes, there would need to be hardware changes. Rather than change the PCB, an add-on board was created that could be soldered in place.

Hi,

If it's a project worth doing, it may well be worth redoing in C, replacing with a completely different chip of your preference. Especially if you have the assembler listing and if it's understandable (some are not that easy, but worth closely examining in case it all makes sense).

It could even be mounted on a small board that could be plugged in to the existing microcontroller socket perhaps, if you're using the original PCBs for the project.

I built a DIY project from an article, that uses an 8051-based chip (8051 core in my case), and it's been a constant irritation because I do not have the development environment set up to easily make modifications to suit my needs over the years. If you intend to share your project with others, they too would appreciate a more modern microcontroller and C code rather than assembler, most likely.

If you're talking about a commercial project, then that's a different matter, you may wish to make as few changes to the code as possible to reduce chance of introducing problems, so then I can understand the need to find a close replacement chip. In one project, I had to do something similar (it wasn't 8051), and the replacement happened to be in a different package, so as well as the code changes, there would need to be hardware changes. Rather than change the PCB, an add-on board was created that could be soldered in place.

That's right, it is a commercial project, and I would like to change as little assembler code as possible. I don't want to redo it in C, because it would involve single stepping/tracing the existing code to fully understand it, which is not possible.  A contemporary IDE would give me the option of replacing some sections with C, which is desirable of course. I don't have an ICE or any debugger for the existing code, so very hard to analyze it.