[Gta04-owner] CPU, Memory

[Glenn Moeller-Holst]

At 11:55 +0100 02/03/11, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:
...
>Unfortunately we did not get beyond approx. 95% completion
>so far. This means that approx. 90 connections
>are still unrouted. And routing them manually with the tools
>we have (we use EAGLE professional) is quite painful and
>very time consuming.

How is that possible ;-) - you have an 8-layer PCB and PoP memory? (ironically)

Now serious:

* Have you tried to rotate one or more chips X degrees?
* Maybe some chips are forgiving if you swap 
pin-connection - if also done in 
software/firmware?

Rule of thumb/hints - maybe tested in arbitrary 
order - see if any of these can help you in any 
way - or just temporarily change your state of 
mind to look at the problem from a different 
angle/perspective of how to place and position 
the components:
* keep HF wires short
* keep high current wires short
* keep LF wires short

* Just a few extra wires: Maybe place a PCB 
FM-antenna around the PCB perimeter with 90° 
diversity connections ;-) Sorry I could not 
resist...

* Maybe add one more Micro-SDHC slot/connector 
somewhere on the board? - I already have problem 
with only one 16GB and I would like a big local 
backup partition.

In some later revision Micro-SDXC might be 
supported? I do not know if the microcontroller 
can handle it.
SDXC:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_Memory_Card#SDXC_.28SD_3.0.29

-

Do you place components on both sides?

>
>We also have looked into KiCAD but it did not appear to
>be mature enough for such a complex and miniaturized
>project and would run into the same mode of manually
>editing.
>
>Well, there are high price commercial tools (Altium, Cadence, Mentor, ...)
>which could be better supporting this work, but converting
>the existing EAGLE project into a file compatible to those
>may loose important information/knowledge/design rules
>and may introduce new costly errors.
>
>Therefore, we are continuing the slow manual path staying
>with EAGLE... The good side is that we already know
>that there are no problems in post-processing and
>production based on the EAGLE files because we have
>done this several times with our PCB supplier. This
>is also an area were experiments are quite costly.
>
>I hope you stay with us and support our project,
>Nikolaus
...

At 14:18 +0000 02/03/11, Neil Jerram wrote:
...
>And another one: please take your time, and don't take on too much
>stress for yourselves.
...

Me too.

regards,

Glenn