Advanced semiconductor chips at a price of a dollar and less

In the recent past, there is no other product whose price has tumbled down to less than a dollar from 10s of dollars in a time-frame of less than 4 -5 years, except semiconductor chips, mainly the logic chips.

NXP Semiconductor has launched ARM cortex based 32 bit microcontroller called LPC1100 family at a price of 65 Cents. This is the listed price. Negotiations can bring this price further down. This MCU device is not that cheap in performance.
LPC1100 is driven by a smart 32 bit ARM Cortex-M0 processor with 45 DMIPS performance, a far higher performance than the age old 8051 based microcontroller (mcu), which is still adopted by most of the engineering colleges in India in their academic subject of embedded system both for theory as well as lab.
Even the evaluation kit by NXP Semiconductor for LPC1100 family is priced at $30, a price most of the learning embedded systems students can offer.

It's not just the NXP, even many microcontroller vendors offer sub $1 MCU chips, check with Texas Instruments (by acquiring Luuminary Micro), Atmel, Microchip, ST Micro or any ARM Cortex MCU vendor. Here the real low cost driver is ARM, whose smart processor cores cost less but perform more.

What's clear is 8051 architecture is fully knocked down ARM processor architecture.

Another sweet price shock is from FPGA vendors, IGLOO nano FPGAs from Actel with gate densities from 10k to 250k system gates available starting from 0.5 $.
Altera has recently launched high performance Cyclone IV FPGAs with 150 K logic elements in the price range $3 to $6.

Again the FPGA kits are also available at affordable prices for the Indian electronics-engineering students. If any B.E or B.Tech student seeks advise on what platform he/she should do the final year embedded systems project, 8051 should be least advised.

Well, if the LCD panel's price falls similar to VLSI chips, a netbook costing few 10s of dollars is not far away.