In the last period, the software defined radio starts to become more and more popular, due to it’s obvious advantages over the analog radio. With SDR, basically you can do almost everything, no matter how complicated the modulation and demodulation techniques are used.
This concept is not new, but the high performance electronics available for low prices have rendered practical many things. Now, it costs only 20$ !
ZPU is a very interesting soft core processor designed to take as little FPGA resources as possible, leaving you a lot of space for peripherals and hardware accelerators. It’s a modern stack based 32 bit CPU, the implementation is independent of the FPGA model and it can also be used in other technologies (e.g. anti-fuse, ASIC).
I have seen a very interesting 8-bit family of microcontrollers, recently launched by Microchip: the PIC16F178X 8-bit advanced analog flash microcontrollers. What’s cool about those microcontrollers, it’s the fact that they have all kind of analog peripherals: