System on Chip

Hi there,

I am wondering if anyone can help me with some design questions I am having.

I have done a fair amount with microcontrollers, mainly AVR's, but now I am reaching the limits of what they can do. So I am starting to look at microprocessors and System On Chip (SOC) devices. The thing is, I know very little about the way these all work. So I am wondering if anyone can help point me in the right direction.

Firstly, can anyone recommend any literature on designing with such devices?

Secondly, I am wondering if anyone knows of a SOC devices which has: Ethernet, LCD, and IDE/ATA Interfaces? Which comes in a non BGA package.

Further, does anyone know of any "coprocessors" which can provide functions lacking from SOC's such as IDE and LCD which have easy driver support from within Linux.

And finally, is there an affordable way of hand soldering BGA packages?

Thanks

Julia

Hi Julia,

Within the SOC family you will find a lot of components with processor, LCD, Ethernet, etc, but as far as I know all are targeting high volume/low size applications, so all are now in BGA. One good candidate could be the Intel PXA255 for example.

However you must know that building a system around one of these chips from start is a quite long task, in particular on the software side (linux drivers integration, etc, etc). The order of magnitude of the complexity have nothing to do with microcontrollers.

So why not using directly a COM (Computer On Module), already supplied with Linux ? For example see

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