Eventually, [Matt] stumbled across this awesome resource for 8051 programming. The 8051 featured a still reasonably respectable 4k of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM – not too dissimilar from an ...

[Andrew] picked up a handful of these big STC 8051 chips for a song and dance. The problem he has with them is the clunky VB6 programming software that only wants to run on a Windows box.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a version of the 8051 microcontroller, one of the most commercially used microcontrollers in FPGA with reconfigurable instruction set.