I'm thinking about using a microcontroller with an 8051 core from Silicon Laboratories. I hope that I can use C rather than assembly language, so I installed SDCC.

I installed the "Silicon Laboratories IDE" to download the executable binaries to the on-chip Flash program memory. It also supposedly can be set up (under the Project > Tool Chain Integration menu) to use "any" 8051 compiler.

I tried to set it up to use SDCC, but every time I hit the "Assemble/Compile File" button it tells me "Compiler process did not sucessfully complete."

How do I get new C code I write onto the SiLabs C8051F310 chip? Is there a web site with a step-by-step HOWTO? (Would it be easier to use a MAKEFILE that calls SDCC, only using the "Silicon Laboratories IDE" for the very last step of downloading the executable binary to the chip?)