Originally Posted By: wfaulk
I'm quite a novice when it comes to this sort of thing, but if I were you, I'd take a look at the Cypress PSoC line. They seem capable and they're super cheap. I don't know exactly what you're doing, but I bet you could get away with using one of their $1.50 chips.

I've got the dev kits for the various PSoC lines here and have used them for quite a few applications. They're fairly flexible in how they're programmed and configured but you have to follow certain restrictions in layout of the special digital/analog blocks. They could do with more RAM really. The C compiler I use with it was a paid license feature. I've no idea about the other one that comes bundled with the development IDE now.

If you're okay with the internal oscillator then you can run one with no external components at all excluding power.