Freescale's new family of MCU-wireless chips give engineers a way to control devices via RF4CE links. The new chips will replace infrared controllers but make the transition smooth. They have Ir capabilities, too. RF protocols include ZigBee, RF4CE, SynkroRF, and plain vanilla IEEE-802.15.4 links.

The five-chip family of timing and pulsing chips--TimerBlox--from Linear Technology lets engineers quickly design circuits to create pulses, modulate pulse widths, serve as one-shot (monostable) pulse sources, and create timing delays. The SOT23 packages and 12 dev boards from LTC make it easy to breadboard and experiment with these 6-pin ICs that generally need only one, two, or three external resistors.

Get a handle on Texas Instruments' MSP430 MCUs with the $4.30 Value Line kit. The small MCU--2 kbytes or flash and 128 bytes of RAM--will work well in alarms, game controls, sensors, small consumer devices, electronic locks, light control, and similar applications that don't require a lot of code.

The "community-supported" BeagleBoard project includes a new member, BeagleBoard-xM that uses a new Sitara ARM Cortex-A8 processor from Texas Instruments. TI also offers its own boards and kits, but at about 10 times the cost. The Cortex-A8 processor looks like a good one for high-end applications, so I dare not call it a microcontroller. Find out more about TI's latest Sitara chips and the new BeagleBoard-xM.

The new GOPHER software, which helps you select the best MCUs, now includes an "Application Search Configurator." Type in, for example, "Motor control of a brushless 3-phase DC motor using BEMF for control with optimal MCU op amps."  The new software finds the MCUs that meet the stated requirements. I doubt you can beat that.