I am currently using F330 in my designs specially for SMBus battery monitoring and chargers.
Formerly I used for this kind of applications 89c4051.
F330 is far better and easier to work with compared with other processors.
There are only two problems I encountered using F330:
- I found it to be not so robust in terms of ESD compared with 89c2051/4051. As a matter of fact I never succeeded to destroy an 89c4051 ( and I often insert it vice versa in the programmer’s socket ) . I used at the beginning the C8051F330DK kit and I found out it is quite sensitive to ESD; for ex: the processor stops when attempting to measure some pins with the oscilloscope ( with internal clock !! ) This never happened with an C4051 even if I removed ( or shorted ) the crystal – the processor always resumed correctly the program

- The IDE is not the best in the world ( but this is not directly related to the F330 chip ) and the Config2 code generator program ( designed specially for F330 ) I didn’t succeed to run it in WinXP – it run very well in Win98

Cristian Ceausescu

elcris@k.ro