I've been playing with the PSoC (programmable system on chip) evaluation kit from Cypress. They have a graphical layout program called PSoC Express. It's simple to drag and drop inputs, outputs, and "valuators" (LUTs, if-else-then structures, etc). They have some excellent interface options, and so far I'm really impressed. The time it takes to create a simple little application is just a few minutes - it would take hours on a PIC. Here's a slide I pulled from one of their presentations:
The PSoC chips have a M8C CISC microcontroller at the core, and analog and digital blocks surrounding it. Reading their literature, these PSoCs can reduce part counts by 50%. To me, they feel like a PIC with a CISC instruction set and a nice set of analog features.
I'll be entering a design into the Cypress Innovator Design Challenge for college students.
