Hello,
"Hi, are there chips that can be done quite quickly that have a market?": I feel that the problem here is not the possible market: we are now in a very preliminarier-than-preliminary stage of chip-making and chip-design. The 555 was chosen as a target not only because of its symbolic perspective, but because this is what can be now done quickly with the knowledge, tooling and resources we have right now, and still can "blink and beep". For example, USBtoIEEE488 would require a USB device controller with significant complexity (data buffers, state machines, endpoint management), and implementing the USB stack needs at least a small MCU (that is complex in itself), not to mention the clock generation, clock-recovery PLLs, high-speeed transcievers etc. needed for USB PHY. Developing this would take at least months of simulation only for the logic (and maybe much more when we consider the analog and mixed-signal part, not to mention the validation...). And I'm pretty sure that implementing an USB device core on silicon will bring in the patent lawyers from USB-IF
and virtually all IP core vendors...
Regards,
Ferenc