Sadly enough, the popular Philips SAA3049 remote control decoder IC is no longer available. No semiconductor foundry offers a replacement type, probably because nowadays remote-control decoding in consumer electronics is performed by customer-specific microcontrollers. We can do the same ourselves!The number of ICs that have been specifically developed for decoding infrared messages is significantly less that the number of available transmitter ICs. This is because there is often already a microprocessor in the receiving device, and it can handle the decoding ‘on the side‘. Depending on the application, a certain amount of supplementary logic is always necessary to integrate a decoder IC into a circuit, and this contributes to cost and space problems. Modern microcontrollers can handle this task just as well or better, and they only cost around 50 pence each in large quantities.