Fast non-bga microprocessor

You might look at Hitach's SH line, and also maybe some of the IBM and Motorola PowerPC's. Note that while the clock rate is lower on PowerPC than ARM, the throughput on the PowerPC can still be comparable.

Other than that, the world is going the way of BGA, especially for faster chips.

Why is BGA expensive for you? Because of prototyping tools, or design software? Once you've got the part on the board, you may well find that there are less solder defects than PQFP, which results in faster bring up, which results in less overall cost. Compare this to what a board house charges to put the CPU on your prototype boards.

-- James Dabbs, TGA (eliminate digits to get valid email address)

I've been told that ADI are putting the Blackfin DSP (600 MHz) into a QFP package. It's got two ALUs so it can actually execute 1200 MIPS.

Leon

The 4000$ or so for a compiler for this family are likely not in the budget when a BGA is considered too expensive.

Rene

It costs us $2 to build a board. If we have to outsource it because of BGA, the boards cost $35 each.

For $2, these sound like simple boards or boards in production quantity. I was thinking more along the lines of prototypes of something complex enough to need a fast, 32-bin processor. My point was, if you need to prototype something complex enough to warrant a 32-bit controller, then BGA does not seem to me to really to create a cost problem. Even your numbers -- "$20" versus "$350" for 10 prototypes -- is a good deal if your $85/hour software engineer spends a few less hours chasing soldering problems on hand-did TQFP's.

-- James Dabbs, TGA (eliminate digits to get valid email address)

Actually, that's not the case. I'm likely to be spending $15K for a complete development system. It only takes 400 boards, at $33 less each, to pay for the development system. Not to mention how much of my time it saves - even if it's a savings of just several weeks, it's paid for itself.

-- _ Kevin D. Quitt 91387-4454 snipped-for-privacy@Quitt.net 96.37% of all statistics are made up

Production quantity, indeed. We aren't going to do fewer than 5,000 units a year. The boards are in the range of 16-to-20 square inches, single- or double- sided, surface mount. The double-sided ones cost closer to $5 (assembly labor and resources).

-- _ Kevin D. Quitt 91387-4454 snipped-for-privacy@Quitt.net 96.37% of all statistics are made up

double-

Many chip vendors are slow to appreciate the PCB costs, but there was a swing a few years ago to 2 layer PCBs in HDDs that gave significant cost savings, and IIRC Intel recently had to respin a chipset to give 4 layer operation, as 6 layers was too costly.

That said, do you seek a 200MHz microcontroller (on chip memory) or a off-chip memory device running on DDR memory or similar ? Single chip should be around in QFP, but external memory devices push pin count, footprint area, and ground integrity, which make TQFP a bigger ask.

-jg

I'm not the OP - I was just chiming in. In my case I'm looking for a tiny system (~128KB program store ~128KB RAM) that's network-capable; Fast is not particularly meaningful for this product.