Re: Linux x uClinux for ColdFires: what is the best for what?

John Bodnar wrote:

 >	:
> My general take is that most of our customers aren't yet willing to go 
> with sub-1 mm ball pitch BGA packages.  We certainly have the options 
> available here (the cell phone business is good that way) should we ever 
> need to offer such packages.

May I suggest that 1mm BGA is pretty clunky by today's standards.

I suppose the challenge for you is that the MPU you start designing 
today may not hit the market for a year. Your earliest client may not 
have his product to market for another year. The bulk of your clients 
may not have a marketable product for at least 3 years hence. My guess 
is that 0.8mm pitch will be considered pretty clunky by then, with 
commodity memory chips being 0.65mm, 1.2v or less. What kind of crystal 
ball do you use assess all of this?

Commodity DDR and flash today comes in 0.8mm BGA packages and PCBs with 
0.8mm BGA pitches and .004" traces no longer command a premium, even in 
prototype quantities ..providing they are purchased from China. For some 
bizarre reason, North American PCB suppliers have problems delivering 
prototype quantities at a reasonable price when trace/space are below 
0.005" with tolerances required for 0.8MM BGAs. So, this business goes 
to China.

For what it is worth, my crystal ball shows MPU boards getting smaller, 
lower powered and faster. Everything that has to be fast would be 
contained on a small, multi-layered board. Slow, high-current industrial 
stuff would sit on a separate connector, relay, driver, signal 
conditioner or whatnot board with a tiny, high-speed plug-in module 
providing smarts, memory and high-speed communications ..because the 
industrial board would be a clunky 2 layer board with thick, heavy traces.

What I am asking is that you consider sub-1mm pitch for your future MPUs 
..and make them frugal enough that heat dissipation is not a problem.

While in this wishful thinking state of mind, I cannot help mentioning 
my Technicolor dream: A new, compact, fast, low powered MPC55xx with the 
PowerPC ripped out and replaced with a ColdFire or Arm core with FlexBus 
LPDDR/DDR2 interface ..and, oh, yes, don't forget USB Host & Device and 
100/100 Ethernet and Phy ..all for < $50.

Why? Because:

a. As I mentioned earlier, having tasted FlexBus and low power, low heat 
dissipation of your newer ColdFires, I got addicted.

b. Having tasted eTPU and MIOS on the MPC5xx, I got addicted.

They are both as good as it gets ..but, regrettably, not on the same MPU 
..yet.

Thanks for listening,

Bob Furber
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