Silicon Labs Does It Again With New ToolStick

Oct. 31, 2006

Silicon Labs continues to lead the industry with flexible, low cost development tools like ToolStick. Its new split personality packaging is similar to Texas Instrument's MSP-eZ430U.

William G. Wong

Silicon Labs was the leader with its initial ToolStick (Sticking It To The Developer, ED Online ID 12142). The new $24.99 ToolStick (Fig. 1) takes on the dual board approach started by Texas Instrument's with its MSP-eZ430U (EiED Online>> Mid-Range Micro Kits, ED Online ID 12991). It is also making the ToolStick Base Adapter (Fig. 2) and ToolStick C8051F330 Daughter Card (Fig. 3) available for $17.50 and $9.90 respectively.

The software included with the kits is based on Keil's 8051 toolset. Keil has been purchased by ARM but it will continue selling its non-ARM processor products. This is good because Keil's µVision (EiED Online>> Developing ARMs, ED Online ID 11307) is a major player across almost all microcontroller platforms. There has been some improvement in the samples and application notes from Silicon Labs only making a good development package even better.

One nice option is the ToolStick Debug Adapter (Fig. 4) priced at $8.90. This plugs into the base unit and to a pin header on a development board. This provides a very low cost development platform for your own hardware and for other development boards that utilize Silicon Labs 8051 processors.

Related Links Keil
www.keil.com

Silicon Labs
www.silabs.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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