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What are the differences between the MCS 251 microcontroller A-Stepping and C-Stepping?

April 26, 2017differences MCS microcontroller

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What are the differences between the MCS 251 microcontroller A-Stepping and C-Stepping?

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The C-stepping of the device came out in May 1996; there are several differences. The configuration bytes CONFIG0 and CONFIG1 were renamed to UCONFIG0 and UCONFIG1. The user must program these configuration bytes. Please refer to the 8XC251SA/SB/SP/SQ User’s Manual on Intel’s Developer site, as well as the latest 8XC251SA/SB/SP/SQ Specification Update. In the C-stepping of the MCS 251 microcontroller, a new address line on P1.7 has been added allowing for 18-bit addressing. This gives the MCS 251 microcontroller 256K of addressable memory as opposed to 128K on the A-stepping. There also have been numerous changes to the AC specs of the C-stepping, compared with the A-stepping. For example, signal Trhdz1 had a large change from 63ns in the A-stepping to 18ns (25ns typical) in the C-stepping.