21/07/2004 11:43:40, Laurie van Someren
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laurie@aleph1.co.uk> wrote:
>Does the board have to stay the same size, in all dimensions ?
It would be exceedingly convenient...
>It would be easier to manufacture and use if it were a bit bigger.
How about emptier, rather than bigger?
The Boot Rom should go inside the PXA package, the USB
controller is removed, the RAM is almost certain to be some tiny
BGA, the audio codec is likely to shrink. The crystals will finally get
smaller, as we no longer need the poxy 3.68MHz crystal, which
_nobody_ makes in a small package. Combine these things, and
there should be acres of space. If I / we can resist filling it with
new features (and I'll try harder to resist, this time), that should
make manufacturing and mounting much easier.
There's also a temptation to move to a removeable memory other
than smartmedia, especially as the PXA27X has inherent support
for Memory Stick (Spit). Smartmedia has served us well, but seems
doomed to never really gain any more capacity, despite the NAND
chips themselves getting ever bigger. I'd like to retain the option.
Any comments from prospective users?
I'm aware that components were very tight on 2.05. The tightest
sections were eased in 2.06, and 2.06 also gained more sensible
connectors, ahorde of mounting holes, and all sorts of other
usability features. Looks like it'll never get made, though, now.
3.00 will certainly try hard to be assemblable by cheaper stuffing
shops. It will continue the single-side-for-simple, double-side-
for-expansion plan, which I think has merit.
(Actually, 3.00 is likely to be huge, and covered with debug
connectors, to give the porting effort as much help as possible).
Steve
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