Industry Expert Blogs

The under the radar, sleepy microcontroller market is about to undergo a rapid transformation the next several years with new entrants and the rise of 32 bit cores that will redefine the parameters for success. This will revive growth and result in new winners and losers. But lots of questions remain.

My first job out of college in 1984 was programming an 8 bit 8051 for a telephone handset. It took months to finish a programming task in assembly language that I thought I could do in a 16 bit microcontroller in a week or so. I begged my boss to allow us to switch. He declined - we couldn’t afford tacking on a couple extra bucks per telephone. Translation: I was underpaid. I swore then that the 8051 would surely be gone in a couple years. Missed that prediction!

Click here to read more ...