I’d rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy. That’s a great plan, unless you’re in the embedded processor business. Down here, you need to shave a little off the frontal lobe from time to time. Even shrink the cortex, you might say.

NXP Semiconductors has a new chip out that lowers the bar for 32-bit microcontrollers. It’s a cute little device that just barely fits into the 32-bit category. In fact, it’s more like a 16-bitter with an 8-bit price tag.

A few years ago, a company called Luminary Micro made headlines with its “32 Bits for a Buck” offer. The company (now part of Texas Instruments) was the first to offer an ARM Cortex-M3 processor for dirt cheap. Now NXP has gone that deal one better. The new LPC1100 chip costs just $0.66 in reasonable quantities. So that makes NXP one-third better than TI, right?