Scott,

I suspect that your attraction to thru-hole parts @5V has a lot to do with ease of prototyping. You should really consider moving away from that and instead take a look at the SiLabs parts. Whilst these operate at 3.3V they have 5V tolerant I/Os that can be used to talk to 5V peripherals such as the common and cheap 5V character mode LCDs. I have used various SiLabs parts in this manner taking advantage of the 5V tolerance of the pins. Included have been the C8051F020, C8051F126, C8051F226 and my favorite part the C8051F340/344 parts.

A major attractive feature of the SiLabs MCUs is the integrated debug hardware built right into each MCU. The debug interface supports program loading, memory peeking and hardware breakpoints all accessed through a low cost USB adapter pod.

I rarely do prototype and development anymore where I try to package the MCU into the prototype at the package level. Instead I use an evaluation board for this purpose that includes breakout pins for the MCU I/Os. The eval boards I use also have the connectors present for the debug adapter so you can very quickly move up to doing your programming and algorithm development.

SiLabs has eval boards available for each of their MCU families. Here is a link to the eval board for my favorite SiLabs part:

http://www.silabs.com/products/...340DK.aspx

I have also purchased a number of these eval boards and find that they work very well:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/EX-F3...106wt_1396

The many of the SiLabs Eval boards come with a Din-96 connector on the side. To this you can connect up a prototype I/O board containing some/all of your I/O to facilitate development. Here is an article on my web site where I show doing this for a setup with the C8051F126 eval board:

http://www.carousel-design.com/SiLabsEval.html

Here is a photo of another one hooked up to a hand built prototype:

http://www.8052.com/users/mjk..._Proto.png

Final comments about the eval boards is that you can use then again and again.

Michael Karas