Development Kits In USB Dongles

Jan. 19, 2006

Development kits get smaller and cheaper with offerings like Silicon Laboratories' MCU ToolStik demo kit and USB Radio (see the figure). Both are based on Silicon Labs' 8051 USB chip, which provides a USB-based debugging interface to other ch

William G. Wong

Development kits get smaller and cheaper with offerings like Silicon Laboratories' MCU ToolStik demo kit and USB Radio (see the figure). Both are based on Silicon Labs' 8051 USB chip, which provides a USB-based debugging interface to other chips on the same board. These include other Silicon Labs 8051-based chips like the F300. The USB Radio incorporates the company's radio tuner chip.

The ToolStik costs around $10. It comes with a small CD-ROM with Silicon Labs' integrated development environment (IDE) and configurator along with an assembler, C compiler, and debugger from Keil. Demo software can blink the LEDs inside the unit.

Silicon Laboratories
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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