One thing that makes me wonder is that the manufacturers that give us one thing insist that we pay for another. Russell advertise his chip with SPI at 1/2 clock speed, but to get it you have to pay for a 24bit a/d converter that is included in the chip. This is by no means an attack on the TI chip/policy, everyone does it. I would like to see some derivatives such as 'plain vanilla' with 32k ERAM, Cygnal and TI without analog, 'plain vanilla' with 2 UARTS.
Now we have Russell on line, let me ask a question: why did TI choose to use the 'rather strange' system of the program in serial flash uploaded to SDRAM at reset?

Erik