The General Situation of AT89C51 1 The application of AT89C51 Microcontrollers are used in a multitude of commercial applications such as modems, motor-control systems, air conditioner control systems, automotive engine and among others. The high processing speed and enhanced peripheral set of these microcontrollers make them suitable for such high-speed event-based applications. However, these critical application domains also require that these microcontrollers are highly reliable. The high reliability and low market risks can be ensured by a robust testing process and a proper tools environment for the validation of these microcontrollers both at the component and at the system level. Intel Platform Engineering department developed an object-oriented multi-threaded test environment for the validation of its AT89C51 automotive microcontrollers. The goals of this environment was not only to provide a robust testing environment for the AT89C51 automotive microcontrollers, but to develop an environment which can be easily extended and reused for the validation of several other future microcontrollers. The environment was developed in conjunction with Microsoft Foundation Classes (AT89C51). The paper describes the design and mechanism of this test environment, its interactions with various hardware/software environmental components, and how to use AT89C51. 1.1 Introduction The 8-bit AT89C51 CHMOS microcontrollers are designed to handle high-speed calculations and fast input/output operations. MCS 51 microcontrollers are typically used for high-speed event control systems. Commercial applications include modems, motor-control systems, printers, photocopiers, air conditioner control systems, disk drives, and medical instruments. The a...
