Crank up Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra. Cue monkeys dancing around the black obelisk. Throw a bone in the air and shout at the sky.

It's the dawn of a new age in embedded engineering.

Xilinx is getting into the ASIC and microprocessor businesses in a big way, and something tells me they're not the only ones. The company's newest chips combine high-end ARM processors, fixed peripherals, and gobs of programmable logic into an all-in-one device that might make ASIC designers think twice about their next big project. For as little as $15, it could take the place of a custom-designed SoC, but without the million-dollar development effort.