Microchip Technology, best known for its low-cost families of PIC microcontrollers, has purchased ZeroG Wireless, a supplier of Wi-Fi-certified transceivers and FCC-certified wireless modules. According to Microchip, the purchase of ZeroG will let microcontroller customers purchase certified Wi-Fi I/O modules and use proven software so they can easily include Wi-Fi communication capabilities in designs.
How often have we said, "I wish I had an extra I/O pin"? Likely more times that we want to admit. Many microcontrollers include serial-communication devices such as UARTs, I2C ports, or SPI ports that communicate with peripheral devices. But those ports require more than one signal line. If you can use 1-Wire communications--developed Dallas Semiconductor--you might eliminate the need for an I2C or SPI port and gain several "extra" I/O pins for other uses.
If you want your software to help control aircraft, it must meet the requirements described in DO-178B, "Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification," created and distributed by the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics. Those requirements apply to software for the latest multicore processors and code for the smallest microcontrollers. Software developers can read the standard or rely on proven commercial tools that examine and test code for compliance. I recommend the latter route.
You might consider an ARM processor for a new project, but the leap from an 8-bit device to a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 processor could seem too far to jump all at once. The Cortex-M0 microcontroller (MCU) might solve this problem.
When I started to learn about digital logic, the 7400-series devices simplified designs and experiments. At the time, Texas Instruments manufactured the SN74181 arithmetic-logic unit (ALU) in a 24-pin DIP and the SN7489 static memory that could store 16 4-bit values. With these and some glue logic parts, engineers could build basic computational circuits. If you think that sounds far fetched, remember that minicomputers of the time ('60's and '70's) used small-scale logic ICs throughout, although they used core memory for storage.
