Sadly, those manufacturers who've offered a significant amount of programmable logic together with an 805x core, perhaps one without the usual peripherals, e.g. timer/counters, UART, haven't been able to stay in business.

I view MCU's as a substitute for hardware rather than as a computing engine, so the hardware as programmable logic would be interesting to me.

XILINX offers a built-in computer core in their high-end products, but those cost too much and offer too little for my purposes. I could go quite some distance with a timerless, uartless 8031 core and ~256 macrocells, particularly if there were enough I/O's to attach external memory, both RAM and ROM, and if the core were able, in fact to use the external ROM as code space. I'd like it to have those multiple DPTR's, though ... and the options that the Maxim/Dallas DS89C4x0's offer for them. With no timers and no uart, one could fiddle with his own clock, generate wait-states, etc, since the timers, if one built them, would use their own timebase, and a UART or USRT of some sort would then be free to use whatever timebase it needs as well, without giving up timers, and without the restrictions on rate that most MCU's provide.

RE