With all the talk of hotrodding pics, which IMHO turns them into say hc11's,
why not not take a road not traveled? How many of you have had to design
something that had to catch data quickly or do combinatorial logic? By uC
standards a PIC is pretty fast, but it's no match for a PAL/GAL (name your
favorite FPGA). Combine a uC with an FPGA in the same package and you save
tons of interconnects. If the pins were configurable with some extended
version of the now defunct TRIS instruction you would have a winner.
Case in point, I recently built an ISA card and a PIC just isn't fast
enough to catch data off the bus so I had to use a latch. Half my PIC pins
went unused. You don't need anything as fancy as a 22v10, but take a 16cxx
core and extend it to say 48 pins (5 8 bit ports) with a little extra gating
between the pin and the port, and your close.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rick Farmer           gt5876b@prism.gatech.edu  `85 CB700SC  AMA# 482666
3510 Buford Hwy K-6   85k miles and 10 years of merciless abuse and it still
Atlanta, Ga. 30329    lives, but then again a spare engine (or two) helps.