Thomas:
I have worked on two axis coordination of a motion control systems including circular interpolation. One of the first such systems I did was on a 486 type computer at 66 MHz and to achieve the calculation of the intermediate points around a curve requires come pretty good C code with floats (I used doubles) and float math. There is no reason that an 8051 couldn't do the calculations BUT it would take a long time. Certainly not in real time.

In the PC type designs I worked on the processor broke all motion down into small micro-vectors in a script compile mode and then in real time the compiled microvector list was used to command the motion controller. "Velocity" was controlled by how short the microvectors were based upon the system sample rate.

I also have done work on this laser system with some of the system engineering and part of the user interface software. In this device the PC host does the laser beam motion profile "compilation" into micro-vectors which are then sent to a separate DSP card which scans the microvector list and steps two mirrors via a pair of 16-bit D/A converters. Interestingly the D/A converters are placed in the laser head and the 16-bit samples are sent from the DSP card to the D/A converters in serial manner at very high speed using differential drivers.

Michael Karas