Justin Fischer wrote: > Does anyone know a good distributor for mini-motherboards? I'd like to build > a spec like IBM's, check this link out: > > http://www.atip.or.jp/WEAR/slides/kamijoh/ Cool details on the IBM VisionPad system. Now on to packing more into a smaller space... As for doing PCB like those, there are a number of manufacturers that can acheive the same densities of parts handling, it's doing that and having a board with a reasonable number of layers that is the problem. A couple of other things to note. Look at the size of the chips in use. They did some serious repackaging of ICs. That is more likely the hangup you will encounter. Look for and use the BGA versions of all the chips you want to use. Seriously look at using huge FPGAs or similar. They will help reduce board space needs and to an extent complexity. Using a large FPGA you should be able to do all the mundane things like SDRAM controling, PCI Bus, PCMCIA slots, IDE controller, parallel, serial, etc without support chips except for signal level translation when needed. I would love to be able to work with FPGAs because one can do so much in so little space. If one is willing to play with dice (name for chips out of the chip carrier package) one can use MCM modules and directly mount chips to them. Note they are expensive to make but high degrees of compactness can be had. An entire PC can be shoved into an MCM module little more than 2"x2". If one wanted to play with a StrongArm CPU, FPGA, 128MByte SDRAM you can put it all on a MCM module about an inch square. The trick in this case is getting all the IO off in a useable manner. A prototype MCM module can easily be $2000 or more. Especially if it's ceramic and has lots of layers. 15+ layers isn't all that uncommon any more. I've herd of MCM moduls having as many as 32 layers and chips mounted on both sides. -- | Bryan Andersen || http://softail.visi.com | | Buzzwords are like annoying little flies that deserve to be swatted. | | -Bryan Andersen | -- Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" to
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