Zilog announces new Z8051 MCU product family

MILPITAS, USA & BIEL, SWITZERLAND: Zilog, a wholly-owned subsidiary of IXYS Corp. and a pioneer supplier of application-specific, embedded microcontroller (MCU) system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for industrial, power management and consumer applications, introduced its new Z8051 MCU product family.

Zilog established itself, more than thirty five years ago, as a supplier of its classic cores the Z80, the Z8 and the Z16 MCU’s, for a variety of applications. Historically, the genesis of the Zilog MCU’s and the ‘8051’ core came out from the same hub in Silicon Valley; thus it is a natural extension for Zilog to introduce the Z8051. This addition, offers Zilog customers a wider MCU base with freedom to design products with their cores of preference.

New targeted customers within the world of IXYS products with existing embedded design platforms using the 8051 core now have an MCU supplier committed to long-term support of their manufacturing needs with a wide range of peripheral mixed signal circuits, driver ICs, power management circuits and power semiconductors.

This powerful Z8051 microcontroller provides a highly flexible and cost-effective solution to a variety of embedded control applications. Development software is provided from numerous and readily available third-party tools support; which often means no change to the development environments that design engineers are already using for their 8051 platforms.

“Zilog, as part of IXYS, has a continuing commitment to support customers with long product life cycles, especially in power management where IXYS has been growing worldwide. With the growth of digital power management in energy efficient products for clean energy generation, automation, appliances, automotive, lighting and telecommunications, we believe that by also offering the popular Z8051, we can accelerate the adoption of our MCU solutions in these markets,” said Steve Darrough, Zilog’s VP of Marketing.

“The world of IXYS, especially for our customers, now includes power semiconductors, analog ICs, Mixed Signal ICs, SSRs, MCUs and RF devices to complete the whole system design like no other semiconductor company. These are indeed exciting times for Zilog and IXYS.”