My spare PDS900 died. I have about 15 active designs all using through hole DIP 20 8K parts. Yearly volume 5K. Lots of years worth of 51 assembler code. I use the basics, no analog, internal reset so the pin is usable, internal osc so the pins are usable etc. I did use the keyboard interrupt on one project.

So I thought I might be able to buy a SL or atmel development system and create a 20 pin socket with the proper ports. I do use the onboard oscillator and baud rate generator for the UART. I looked at SL and see that the SFR's are different from NXP for their internal clock. Atmel has a dev board but does not sell the board itself

I've spent the day looking at Zilog, Atmel, SST etc for 51core DIP parts (SL has no dip). but no clear option. I looked at ARM assembly but that would be a big leap.

What did the industry move to after the 51, ARM?
Will I need heavy duty IDE (Keil etc. or will the low cost stuff replace the PDS900). Recommendations?
Thoughts and comments are welcome.

 

What did the industry move to after the 51, ARM?

In my opinion the greatest advantage of ARM is its ability to run embedded OS.

 

I am not sure about the others in 89LPC9xx family, but the 89LPC922 can be programmed via a serial port.

 

don't know about any others but if there is one place that still caries development systems, compilers, programmers, boards, protoboards etc for variety of platforms (even for ageing 51) it is MikroElektronika:

http://www.mikroe.com/eng/categories/view/15/8051-development-tools/