Microcontrollers - key to innovation

New technology is responsible for many new products. It is also the enabling tool for moving existing ideas and products into completely new realms of use. It is not even particularly noteworthy in this time frame to mention that there are portable computers available for about one-thousand dollars that are more powerful than medium level mainframes of 20 years ago. The enabling technology is, of course, the integrated circuit. That is, racks of boards crammed with individual components along with many pounds of core memory have been translated into single printed circuit boards that fit into a box which will sit on an ordinary desktop. However, there are many other applications, in general, that have been enabled by the same technology that revolutionized, or more correctly, created the desktop computer industry.