Hi Sascha,

I'm in the process of designing a new board including the Cygnal C8051F236. As I prepare for this, I've been prototyping using their eval board with the C8051F00. I've used it to connect to a ScanLogic SL811 USB eval board and gotten my USB code out of the way. I'm very happy with the Cygnal chip on a couple of levels. First of all, their email customer support has been incredible--they have not only been helpful from the standpoint of explaining what goes on with their chip, but have made good suggestions regarding interfacing their chip to another chip I want to use. Second, their IDE is relatively easy to use--it is still new, and has some bugs, but they are happy to hear about them, and open to suggestions. My project uses multiple assembly files which are included together--I did this to make it easier to read and manuever through the code. The IDE doesn't deal well with this, so if I get an error message on assembly, I can't just click on it to go to the error because it doesn't know which file its in. I get around this by looking at the list file. With regard to speed, I have no reason to not believe their specifications. However, I would note that if you use their internal oscillator to note that it doesn't have a very tight tolerance. Another consideration you might want to think about is that currently their chips don't support MOVX with external memory. You can bit-bang to XRAM, and with the speed of the controller, it is probably still faster than using a traditional 8051. Best of luck.

Josh