Modern microcontrollers make it possible to cram a whole lot of functionality into an extremely small volume. Things that, in the past, required a bag full of chips to accomplish can now be realised in a single IC without any great difficulty. Of course, such a microcontroller still needs to be programmed and this is often done with the aid of high-level programming languages. But this has the disadvantage that the designer can lose the link to what goes on at the port or transistor level inside such devices.