Help 8051 or pic(16F..)

Hi all.. I am going to join in private institute to learn about microcontroller..
I do not know what to learn or which one to get experience with..

suggest me what to choose..

condition is, i can learn only 1 of the above.. they asked me to do 8051..
Also tel me some comparisons.. then it il b easy to me...

Thanks.

The 8051 is an ancient device, that only seems to be used in India and such places these days? - the PIC is a more modern device, although quite old now as well - but is probably the most popular these days?. To the extent that PIC has become the common name for any micro-controller.

To some extent it doesn't matter which you learn - but if you scan these forums you will see LOT'S of questions from India about 8051's, and very few answers! - whereas the PIC questions get a lot more results!.

Nigel is right the 8051 is old. Not dead.
Many many companies make 8051 derivatives. Atmel, Dallas Semi, NXP, Silicon Labs, WinBond Ele, Texas Instruments to name a few. There are many FPGAs and ASICs that include an 8051. I have uses 100MIP 8051s. A 5MIP PIC seems slow.
You will not go wrong with either micro!

Yes you are 100% correct...
I'm too from india only..
But here i have source to study 8051 only...

Would be easy to catch up "PIC" by myself after complete the 8051 or would be difficult?..

mytech said:

Yes you are 100% correct...
I'm too from india only..
But here i have source to study 8051 only...

Would be easy to catch up "PIC" by myself after complete the 8051 or would be difficult?..

Click to expand...

If you're learning 8051, and you want to move to a more modern device, I would suggest moving to the Atmel AVR series, as it's more similar to the 8051.

But learning PROGRAMMING will enable you to fairly easily move between devices, and it's probably a good idea to learn multiple devices.

Thanks a lot il keep learn diff. devices...

I dont consider myself an expert in assembly language programming, however:

I was taught the basics of machine code and assembler on a PDP11, this was to give an understanding of the way the hardware worked and to aid faultfinding.
I then went on to teach myself enough 8080, 6800, and Z80 to write simple test programs to exercise hardware.
From a hobby perspective I taught myself PIC assembler and have produced a few usefull devices with PICs.

So, the point is, if you understand the basic principles, the way the instructions work, the way the registers relate to the hardware, then it should be no great problem to transfer that knowledge from one processor to another.

JimB