Along the way, this 8031 architecture gained enviable market acceptance. Many semiconductor manufacturers started either manufacturing the 8031 devices as such (Intel was liberal in giving away license to whoever asked) or developing a new kind of microcontrollers based on 8031 core architecture.Manufacturers modified the basic 8031 architecture and added many new peripheral functions to make them attractive to the designers.
Because of the rush, electronic community started getting a variety of 8031 based devices with range of options. To beat the competition, manufacturers developed different microcontrollers with many unique features.These parts are popularly known as ‘8031 Derivatives’. Almost every decent manufacturer boasted of
having an 8031 based microcontroller in the line card. First major manufacturer was the Philips who brought out more than 40-50 derivatives with a variety of I/O options, memory combinations, and peripheral functions. Devices became available in regular DIP
and SMD packages. With the basic 8031 core, Philips ported high capacity Program Memory (upto 32K/64K), its patented I2C interface bus, 8/10 bit Analog to Digital Converters, CAN Bus, Capture and Compare registers, Watch dog timer, PWM facilities and etc. More I/O ports (as many as eight ports), additional timer/counter, second serial port were also made available in Philips devices.Apart from all these, Philips developed many consumer devices meant for telecom, computer and TV applications. A smart card controller was also developed by incorporating a cryptographic engine. So Philips clearly established itself as the market leader in 8031 derivatives and still caters to this segment.Then came Dallas semiconductor. Dallas redesigned the 8031 architecture and eliminated waste clock cycles of original core and made all instructions executed in less clock cycles (maximum of 4) which has traditionally taken upto 12 clock cycles. So, came the birth of High speed 8031 Derivatives.Dallas also maintained the same device pin out configurations to enable the user get upto 3X performance by replacing slower parts with a Dallas device. So, existing compiled code started running faster without any modification. These days, you can find Dallas devices giving upto 50 MIPS (MillionInstructions Per Second).