Ok, I’m going to list here a few chips that work well for getting access to the outside world. The catch? They’re in annoyingly small packages for your average hobbyist, barring large pin bed BGA packages.
Analog:
ADT7515:
http://www.analog.com/en/prod/0,764_81 … %2C00.html
I2C/SPI temperature sensor that also can provide 4 10 bit ADC and 4 12 bit DAC.
The ADC has 2 speeds (slow and fast), can be set up to do a self-updating round-robin check (so it always has a value in hand), and can be set to do a single or 16 sample onchip averaging. Max single sample speed is ~22KHz. The temperature reading uses the same ADC, but takes twice as long to do. The DAC outputs on all channels simultaneously, and has some decent performance.
I’ll add more to this list later.