[Tinkerphones] GTA04A5: good news and bad news

[Rainer Dorsch]

Hi,

solidrun sells SOMs with the i.MX6

https://www.solid-run.com/freescale-imx6-family/imx6-som/

Not sure if this works for a phone formfactor and if it helps to reduce risk and cost.

I can confirm that the stock Debian kernel runs very robust on their Cubox-i and Hummingboard using these SOMs. Open source graphics relies on etnaviv, this I have not yet tested myself.

Rainer


On Wednesday 22 February 2017 21:26:09 H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:
> Hi Alexey,
> 
> > Am 22.02.2017 um 20:05 schrieb Alexey Ignatov <lexszero at gmail.com>:
> > 
> > Hello.
> > 
> > 2017-02-22 18:55 GMT+02:00 H. Nikolaus Schaller <hns at goldelico.com>:
> >> Snapdragon: would be fine, but unobtainable in small quantities.
> >> Mediatek: afaik the same
> >> RockChip: I don't know if they have PoP mobile chips
> >> Allwinner: AFAIK no PoP and not power optimized for mobile operation
> >> Apple A10: unobtainable
> >> Exynos: AFAIK not well supported
> >> 
> >> So TI did alway have the best support for the open/free soft/hardware
> >> community (except the IMG PVR SGX). Hence the DM3730 would still be a very
> >> good choice.
> > 
> > And what about Freescale/NXP i.MX6 SoC's? There are PoP variants exists,
> 
> Oh, nice. I wasn't aware of this. Last time I checked (may be 3 or 4 years ago),
> I didn't notice. Maybe it is newer and we had no need to reconsider.
> 
> But a quad core ARM Cortex A9 doesn't look bad at all:
> 
> http://www.nxp.com/assets/documents/data/en/data-sheets/IMX6DQCPOPEC.pdf
> 
> Probably the right choice would be MCIMX6Q7CZK08AD which is available
> in prototyping quantities: https://octopart.com/search?q=MCIMX6Q7CZK08AD
> 
> But it is approx. 50% more expensive than the DM3730.
> 
> Very interesting is that although they have a similar to the OMAP BGA grid
> on the bottom side of the chip it appears as if it has a hard case. This makes
> soldering much less risky because warpage during soldering is avoided. The
> drawback may be that the total package is thicker (1.25mm + PoP) compared
> to 0.9mm +PoP for OMAP-CBB package.
> 
> Really good seems to be that it is 12x12mm like OMAP3. So it fits into the
> available space. But it uses a 0.4mm pitch and 216 balls PoP memory instead
> of 0.5mm and 168 balls. This means that it can't use the same memory chips
> and we have to research if an 1GB DDR + 512MB NAND exists in that package.
> 
> On the SoC I/O capabilities it looks at a first glance as if the interfaces
> are similar enough that it could technically be possible to build a GTA04X6
> around it without loosing any functions (except analog TV output but it would
> have HDMI).
> 
> > and
> > also great documentation and open-source community support (one
> > example: Novena). Mainline kernel support is also just fine.
> > I've worked with different i.MX SoC's for some time, it's not perfect,
> > but much, much more developer-friendly than
> > Allwinner/Broadcom/Samsung.
> 
> Indeed!
> 
> What a pity that we neither have money left nor capacity, to do another
> redesign (which would mean reworking the power supply and almost the full
> PCB layouts).
> 
> BR and thanks for this suggestion,
> Nikolaus
> 
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-- 
Rainer Dorsch
http://bokomoko.de/
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