Embedded systems are getting all touchy-feely. The iPhone ushered in the era of touch-sensitive user interfaces, and now everybody wants one. Nintendo’s Wii introduced most of us to MEMS accelerometers that can tell whether you’re holding it sideways or upside-down or swinging it around. Jogging shoes come with sensors that measure the length of your stride and count the number of steps you’ve taken, even calculating calories burned on the way to the next Starbuck’s.

Well, get ready to make it more interesting. Freescale is rolling out a new line of “smart” sensor chips that do more than just measure and report raw data. They take care of that “processing” part, too. The company has taken run-of-the-mill sensors and combined them with a ColdFire processor, an I²C interface, and some memory. The result is a one-chip sensor subsystem that detects stuff, filters and massages the data, acts on it, and delivers the predigested result to a host processor elsewhere in your system.