[strags]

I used to have a favorable opinion of Microchip, until their patent case against Scenix.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Court+Rules+for+Scenix+Semicon...

Featuring such fabulous claims as:

-- Having a number of I/O pins that is less than the instruction word size; the SX Series 12-bit instruction word is clearly smaller than its number of I/O pins.