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STMicroelectronics has the STM8S Discovery kit for around US$7. For that little bit of money you get an 8 bit CPU with a detachable USB programming/debugging board and 32k of flash, 2k of RAM, and 1K of EEPROM. Downloadable tools include demo C compilers from a variety of third party vendors (limited to 16k, if I'm reading the literature correctly).

Recent advances in the size and performance of FPGAs, coupled with advantages in time-to-market, field-reconfigurability and lower up-front costs, make FPGAs ideally suited to a wide range of commercial and defense applications [6]. In addition, FPGAs generality and reconfigurability provide important protections against the introduction of Trojan horses during semiconductor manufacturing process[8]. As a result, FPGA applications increasingly involve highly-sensitive intellectual property and trade-secrets, as well as cryptographic keys and algorithms [7].

Ozmo Devices, the leading provider of low-power Wi-Fi Personal Area Network (Wi-Fi PAN) solutions, announced today that it started sampling its OZMO2000 chip to select peripheral manufacturers.  This is the first Wi-Fi solution to overcome the battery life, cost and compatibility issues that have limited the broad adoption of Wi-Fi for HID (human interface device) applications.  The OZMO2000 is currently available for use in Wi-Fi mouse, keyboard and remote control designs.  Furthermore, the solution is compatible with all Wi-Fi-enabled notebooks and desktops that are compatible with Windows 7.

LED luminaires require precise power and heat management because LEDs convert most of the electrical energy they receive into heat rather than light. Without adequate thermal management, this heat can degrade the LED's life span and affect color output. Also, LEDs can fail short because they are silicon devices, so they may require fail-safe backup in the form of overcurrent protection. Resettable PPTC (polymeric-positive-temperature-coefficient) circuit-protection devices have demonstrated their effectiveness in a variety of LED-lighting applications. Like traditional fuses, they limit current after they exceed specified limits. However, unlike fuses, PPTC devices can reset after the fault clears and the power cycles.

NXP BV (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) has said it will demonstrate a microcontroller based on the ARM Cortex-M4 at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, California. NXP was one of the first companies to license the Cortex-M4 processor core and a chip has been implemented using a low-leakage 90-nm process technology. This enables performance in excess of 150-MHz clock frequency, NXP said. NXP has added proprietary power-down techniques to reduce power consumption. The ESC Silicon Valley demo will show that a 7-channel audio graphic equalizer application processing 32-bit precision audio data requires only 12 MHz of CPU bandwidth using the Cortex-M4 DSP extensions, and 60 MIPs without. The core includes DSP extensions not usually found inside a microcontroller and NXP's implementation are aimed at a broad set of applications including motor control, digital power control and embedded audio.