Back in the hazy days of the early home computers, many of us would rejoice at running our first BASIC applications, some of us even built our own 8-bit system from a handful of ICs and felt elated ...

According to Isuppli's 2004 microcontroller-unit-market forecast, 8-bit devices account for more than 40% of sales. However, the assumption behind the migration from legacy 8- and 16-bit applications ...