The Dolphin microcontroller is an enhanced 8051 core and is based on the industry-standard 8051 architecture. The MCU is an enhanced Intel 8-bit 8051 core with program and data memory located in separate memory spaces (Harvard architecture). The instruction set supports direct, indirect and register addressing modes. The core registers are accumulator, stack pointer and data pointer registers in addition to the general registers.

More information about the 8051 core you can find here:

• 8051 tutorial (http://www.8052.com/tut8051)
• MCS® 51 Microcontroller Family User's Manual http://plit.de/asem-51/mcs51man.htm

In the following list you can see the features that are compatible to the 8051 core:

• instruction set and pipeline
• memory architecture
• interrupt system (partially)

the following features are proprietary Dolphin implementation:

• timers
• uart
• i/o ports
• interrupt handling
• power modes
• extended address bus
• flash handling and architecture

Instruction Cycle
As the Dolphin has an enhanced core the instruction execution is significantly faster as by the genuine 8051 Intel. The MCU runs on a 16,384 MHz clock. 1 instruction cycle = 1 XTAL cycles = 61,035 ns.