ST Micro logic expander; Press release of the week

OK, jaded mob-soldier cynic that I am, when I got this press release from the lovely and congenial Carol Brown about ST Micro’s new logic expander chip I was going to write my own press release about the exciting new 74LS138 logic expander that can miraculously take three wires and turn it into eight wires. Think of the PR hype I could surround that press release with— “magic, 3 wires turned into 8!”  So the ST gizmo, the STMPE2401 (pdf) is not that lame. It takes I2C and you can run a keypad controller, a Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) controller, a 3-wire rotating-wheel controller and it also integrates an Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) and a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC), allowing the host system to implement a wide range of mixed-signal features. Cool. $1.50 in 100k (!) quantities. I guess they expect to sell a lot of these. The STMPE prefix you can remember from The Ren and Stimpy Show or it is almost and anagram of SMPTE, immortalized in the Zappa song here.