The custom design of an LPC54016 we just completed, has been built, debugged, and delivered to the customer. A new trend is for serial peripherals to be combined and then configured in software. This is true of the LPC54016 which has Flexcomms that can be used as UARTs, I2Cs, SPIs and some for I2S.
Scrolling history for commands and searches have been added to the MakeItC and BASICtools.
Tod has been busy, he wanted to hear our boards driven from BASIC, so starting with an Epson S1V30120 speech synthesis IC on a TextToSpeech Click module, he translated the library from C to BASIC (no small task) and then brought that code up on our SuperPRO, the Itaca uChip and other SAMD21 boards.
One of our OEM customers has been using our SuperPRO. For a new project they needed some more speed, so they gave the LPC54005 a try. Turns out the speed was great, but they needed more than the 50 control points. They needed 80 control points and 4 RS-232 serial ports.
Sometimes a couple more IOs are needed in a design. Often these are configuration or IOs that do not change very often. These can be handled by some simple TTL logic devices, many of which were designed in the 1970s. The fact that they are still in use indicates how valuable they still are in hardware design.