Developing for 8‑Bit Devices#

Hardware Configurator (Configurator) for 8-bit devices is part of Simplicity Studio® 5 (SSv5) and greatly simplifies EFM8 and C8051 MCU peripheral initialization by presenting peripherals and peripheral properties in a graphical user interface.

The 8051 SDK contains an extensive and nearly comprehensive set of examples for 8-bit MCU peripherals for each supported device family. These examples show simple use cases for each peripheral, and can be used as building blocks for larger systems incorporating multiple peripherals, or as a starting place for applications requiring each peripheral. Projects based on these examples are customized by changing code as described in About Projects and by updating peripheral configuration using the 8-bit Hardware Configurator.

In Hardware Configurator, most of the initialization firmware can be generated by selecting peripherals and property values from combo boxes or entering register values in text boxes. Some peripherals provide calculators, such as baud rate, timer overflow rate, and SPI clock rate, that can be used to automatically confirm the necessary reload register value to generate the specified clock rate. Hardware Configurator also provides real-time property validation to ensure that a configuration is valid before downloading code to the MCU.