[Neal Probert]

The StrongARM may be a possibility, but I haven't seen many instances of it being used in embedded systems. I see that the tools are out there for embedded ARM development.

Many microcontrollers are microprocessors where the CPU core has additional I/O circuitry wrapped around it. Many of the old 8 and 16 bit micros have morphed into use as microcontrollers since they are no longer useful in personal computers. Motorola has done this with the 68000 and the PowerPC. Even Intel and its' licensees have embedded versions of the 386, 486 and Pentium.

The auto industry is a very heavy user of embedded chips, and they often ask the manufacturers to design chips just for their needs. For example, Ford has the PTEC which is an embedded version of the PowerPC chip.

As for Scheme, yes it's powerful, but a bad choice for embedded and real-time programming. Any language you use must have deterministic behavior in that you know how long it takes to respond to events (latency) and how long it takes to perform a task (performance).