Hi all,

I'd like to design a new development board with a 8051 microcontroller's familly for general purpose.
As I'm using a C compiler (Keil), I would say that the board will require high RAM & ROM capacity.
Moreover, I absolutely want to use the ISP capability instead of classsic EPROM.

I was thinking to the 89c51RD+ which has 64Kb of flash, but only 1Kb of RAM.
The RAM capacity seems to be low...
It seems to me that a minimum of 8Kb of RAM would be enough to manage all the variables.

Question : Do you think I should design a board with external RAM & FLASH (huge application : Flash, Ram, EEprom, Cpu, Adress decoder, external I/O, ...) or to design with the 89c51rd+ without any peripheral adjonction ?

If I want to extend the Flash memory up to 128Kb, should I change to a 16bit cpu or the bank switching is easy enough to design ?

... that is the question ...

Thanks

Stephane
stephane.rey@netcourrier.com