[dragontamer]

Microchip just launched the SAM9X60 like three years ago.

600Mhz and 128MB of DDR2 RAM is plenty for many applications. It's pretty much the lowest end processor you can get that will still run a Web server / GUI for easy network dongle. Even if it's on an ancient ARMv5 it still gets the job done today.

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Car and automotive is even lower end in practice. Every button is a uC whose only job is to convert button clicks into LINbus or CAN bus commands for the central computer.

No reason to go below 180nm for a lot of these chips... Well aside from cost. The older 90nm or 180nm nodes are IIRC getting more expensive as the old wafers are drying up (200mm vs modern 300mm).

A lot of cost optimized chips are 40nm to my knowledge, and others are 28nm now. TIs MSPM0 line comes to mind.