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More Fun With 1 Chip Systems
Anonymous Coward writes "Axis, maker of the ETRAX system-on-chip, has just announced a multi-chip module that has the same pinout as their ETRAX SOC but which contains over 50 components. According to this article at linuxdevices.com, all you need to add is an external 20MHz crystal and power, to end up with a fully functional networked Linux system. It contains 8 megs sdram & 2 megs flash. Now you can really put Linux anywhere! The estimated price (when it hits production) to buy these little goodies is $75 (qty 1) down to $50 (qty 10K). "
for under $100? At that scale?
I understand the size factor... pin-outs to all of these input/outputs. your connectors will be more space consuming than your actual hardware. But the price? Did I fall asleep and wake up in 2020 or something? Walk into a computer store and see how much they get for a SCSI card, IDE controller, NIC, and PCI USB card... And all that, in the size of a pack of paper matches, for under $100?
Well, the size does suprise me, a bit. But I really would like an answer on the Price thing. Can someone tell me how they make and sell this for $75, or is that a ./ typo?
Yea, I've watched the the uXXimm project for a while (since before it was a dimm), and it's always been interesting. Just like the half dozen x86's on a DIMM. But, the killer to all of those is the price, which is >$300.
Video... Who the hell cares, if you can telnet/ssh to it (ssh might be a bit of a cpu hog for the encription/compression though).
Just because it's embedded doesn't mean it can't benifit from storage space. Why would talking about USB, ATA, and SCSI mean we weren't talking about embedded?
Just because it's another point of view, doesn't make it a troll... Just look at the link, look at the ports listed in his link. Look at just one example like hpcmips and try to say it's not relevent. NetBSD has a long standing history of running on cheap, cool, novel hardware. This would be almost "too easy" for NetBSD.
After all, we're talking embedded now, it's a VERY valid point to bring up something other than Linux, and point out the tons of other cool hardware out there in this arena.
>um.... it was the embedded guys that were the first hackers of the first PCs. Not the other way around.
My understanding is that they developed essentially at the same time. I mean, the early PC's were built by hobbiest around the early microprocessors like the Z80, 6502, and the 8008. Was there really an embedded market that existed before those early microprocessors? What did they build systems with? The computing industry back then was still pretty much "mini-computers", which meant racks and racks of discrete SSI (and maybe some MSI) components to make up what we know today as the CPU.
I wasn't around in those days, though. Was there an embedded market that coexisted with mini-computers? I'm curious what an embedded system from back then would look like.
--Lenny
> Is there any way to communicate without having an accurate clock?
Yes, you can. I used to work on microcontrollers that had a low power mode wherein they shut off the external crystal, and instead used an internal ring oscillator for a clock. This is a big power savings, but the oscillator made for a poor clock: it was slow and it's period varied wildly. The uncertainty made it unacceptable for anything requiring accurate timing...even, in some cases, memory accesses. Still, it was useful for some things.
I think most commonly, the micro would go into this low power state, and sit in a loop, periodically polling it's serials. If anything interesting happened (say, change in position of a machine assembly), it would kick the clock back on and, once stable, execute the appropriate control routine, which likely required accurate timing.
Microcontrollers are really quite fascinating. It's amazing what you can do with just a very little computational power. The hackers who stayed up nights bumming single instructions out of their ASM routines in the early days of the PC now have a home in the embedded world, where resources are still tight.
--Lenny
Those need low power systems. I don't think this has been designed to be a low power system. They also need cheep, my last GPS was $120, replacing the DragonBallEX ($25) with this would bump the price, and lose the LCD display...and none of them need a ethernet nearly as much as a 802.11 wireless net...
Those would be a better place. However I'm not sure it would be ideal for the PVR, that needs a drive controller, and an interface to the MPEG encoder(s), or at least the decoder and tuner devices...
I don't know exactly where I would use one. I assume they are already in web cameras though. Actually it might be decent for use in a stereo with a dedicated MP3 decoder (however if you do it all in software you could switch to Ogg/Vorbis later, so there is something to be said for faster CPUs there).
It is a safe bet that they pretty much designed this for themselves, and are selling it to anyone that has a use for it. Not a bad way to go, as long as the people buying it don't cut into your web cam market :-)
I'm not sure a 100Mhz 68000 can do great machine vision algos, but it would be pretty good for less intensive tasks. (Yes, it isn't a 68000, but despite them advertising it as a "RISC" CPU, the instruction set is very very similar to the 68000...and I don't imagine the performance will be any better...)
I wonder if the computerized machine tool manufacturers have thought about this?
Yes, for this application the ethernet support would be an asset. But what support does the package have for analog/digitital IO? This is the be-all and end-all in industrial control. Even the lowly 68HC11 has onboard A-D.
Also don't forget, industrial control tends to be the wooden-spokes and horse-powered side of the industry. It takes absolutely ages for anything current to find its way onto the factory floor.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
So then, where do you get someone to solder your chip to the bga adapter? it still has the same problem, getting a reliable and solid connection between all pads on the BGA to the board/adapter.
Heck I found a place that has BGA sockets. They were glad to sell me a socket for $160.00USD it had tiny springs and cone points to secure a solid connection to each pin etc... but adding that kind of money to each BGA chip makes the project worthless to try and forces the home hacker to just either buy a dimmpc or a PC-104 board.
On a side note- Thank you Hitachi for not making only bga, every SH series processor is available as QFPA.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
All the new manufacturers are making thse wonder cips as BGA packages. guarenteeing that no-one other than a massive board house can try to prototype with them. I wanted to do a prototype with the machZ desperately. It fit all specifications and would have been perfect. it is only available as a BGA and will never be produced as a QFPA per the sales and engineering people.
I have tried hot-air to get a BGA to solder to the board without luck you never get all pins soldered without either an commercial IR or Hot air rework station.... and for some reason us home hackers dont have an extra $40K lying around to buy one.
If they want wide acceptance and use... produce it in a hand solderable version (Not DIP, good grief no... DIP is evil) it will make life easy for us home prototype builders and the corperate guys that dont have to take over a rework station just to try a design.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Hmm, 100Mbps Ethernet on-chip, 8M SDRAM, 2M flash, running a 20MHz RISC cpu. $50 each in quantity.
/.-ers can, and a few probably will, too.
:)
10 of these should make for a heck of a Beowolf cluster. Also, ten of then will "eat" a whopping 12 watts of 3.3volt power. They're also rather small - should be fairly easy to build "Beowolf boards", able to tackle many compute-intensive tasks on a minimal size- and power-budget, and not too much of a dollar-budget, too.
I can't think of anything I do that could use this idea, but I'm quite certain that a dozen other
Way-cool idea, guys!
Lemon curry?
Isn't buckshot like a Beowulf cluster of rocks?
/me ducks and runs
What you really want is one of these.
Dual EtherMACs, triple host USB ports, phat FPU, audio, VGA/LCD/TV, 200MHz ARM920T core. It's supposed to cost less than this MCM kludge and be available sooner. Did I mention that it will run Linux?
There's a guy at my work who can hand-solder BGA parts. He's good. Really, really good. He uses a combination of a solder fountain and a heat gun.
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
Mainly because it's very hard to build an accurate oscillator in an IC. Some microcontrollers have a "crystal-less" oscillator but they use an external RC (resistor-capacitor) network for setting the clock period. You'd probably get around +/- 20% if you're lucky. They're probably using one oscillator to drive everything (VGA circuitry, USB host, etc.) with a number of PLLs to get the various individual clocks they need, and things like USB and VGA need accurate clock frequencies.
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
Cheap competitor to Palm.
Homebuilt robotics.
Arena-grade laser tag SBC.
Keychain network diagnostic tool.
Keychain security client.
Wearable computer system.
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
You can build an on chip oscillator (this is done for virtually any modern RF circuit), however in order to make it slow enough to drive digital circuits you would need large valued passive components on board, these are expensive to implement as they will consume a large die area.
Concievably you could build a prescaler to handle the fast oscillator and scale it down to a managable speed but since a free running oscillator will have a rather imprecise speed, this prescaler must be designed very carefully.
The lack of a predictable clock will also be a detrimental for the end user as performance will vary rather wildly.
The use of an external timing source will enable you to stabilize and normalize the clock speed, which is exactly why you want a crystal.
Use of higher level timing sources like a heartbeat over ethernet is not apropriate as proper reception of such data really requires an accurate timing in the first place.
Generally reception of data without sunchronization is possible as long as the data is recieved much slower than the local clock. This way we can sample the data signal fast enough to make sense of it. I doubt such a scheme is appropriate for ethernet. (since the ethernet driver is on board you need to sample the ethernet signal directly which means you need a timing insensisitive way to transform the ethernet symbols to simple logic level signalling. I doubt this is a trivial task)
All of thouse use much cheaper intergrated processors.
There are a bunch of oscillator technologies that don't involve crystals that can be mounted on an MCM. They are either less precise or much more expensive than a crystal.
The ethernet interface needs a precision clock, or it won't work right. So a cheap truly solid state oscillator won't do.
I was thinking of getting one of these and replacing my existing simple HVAC controller with it. More as a fun project than anything else. I don't need to, but it would be fun to build.
Yeah well, real nerd geeks who can spell "hackers" correctly wear Duffs..... :)
Wow, "27mm x 27mm PBGA IC package". Now I can put Linux into my Nike's and boot my win98se POS out the window....
In light of some of the recent articles about building cheap/free super comptuers with armies of cheap low power computers, this seems like an great pontential application for these chips.
You can just swap out individual chips as you upgrade the system. Plus, the cluster would be much MORE compact since you don't need big cases/motherboards. You could run thousands of nodes within a single cooling cabinet.
It looks like these chips at at least 100MIPS processors which puts them on par with 80Mhz Pentiums. About the same order of magnitude of processor the recent article was about.
These are usefull in things like netwokr attatched cameras, vending machines, it is not meant for use as a desktop machine, it is for embedded devices.
-- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.
If I *EVER* get a kernel panic when I turn my TV on, I'm holding you personally responsible. *grumble, grumble*
- Sometimes you're the pidgeon, sometimes you're the statue.
Is there any way to communicate without having an accurate clock?
Morse Code has no accurate clock, and works just fine. (I'm not joking or patronizing in pointing this out. Your question is a good one.)
A "latch" signal is one which tells a related circuit that it is okay to perform some task: "the data is ready to read", "the data is ready to write", "the inputs are ready to combine", etc.
A "clock" is just a way to organize many circuits on the same latch signal. All data must be ready at the same time, and then the clock strikes, latching all the circuits that use that data. Most simple data circuits will work if you clock them once a year, instead of once every few nanoseconds.
A clock has to be set to a period that the worst-case circuit can cope with. If it takes a circuit a long time to generate its results, the next circuit had better not be latched too early, so the clock is slowed to make sure the results are always ready in time.
Parallel printers work on a single latch, and no clock is needed. Other communications would be possible quite easily without the assumption that latches always occur at a fixed frequency. Ethernet may be trickier, but it's the same principle.
[
Higher integration and smaller packages do not necessarily mean less hackable computers. The ETRAX 100LX, the current offering, boots a 2.4.5 kernel w/ a few patches. It does have a unique but well documented instruction set. And it is highly integrated. These folks have done the gcc port and the kernel port well, and they seem serious in their chosen approach.
The next thing to remember is to put next things next.
Ok, I understand that the crystal is external because it can't easily be integrated, and the oscillators which are easy to build in silicon aren't very accurate.
But I wonder, could an inaccurate on-silicon clock be used to drive the system slowly until it could pick up an accurate time signal from some other source? I'm assuming that the easily built oscillators are relatively stable.
The "obvious" idea of using NTP to query external clocks in order to compute one's own frequency obviously wouldn't work, since without an accurate clock you can't communicate... or can you? Is there any way to communicate without having an accurate clock?
Yes, this is all windy speculation, but I'm hoping that someone out there will have more of a clue about this stuff than I have.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I've designed boards with microprocessors on them, and I appreciate the external crystal. The more I look at Axis's products, the more it seems like they actually know what they are doing.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
You can build 'clocks' without crystals, but it involves doing Bad Things with feedback loops etc, and will vary wildly in speed based on tiny temperature shifts, the particular chip used, etc, etc. Some experimentally-computer-generated FPGA configurations have used these, but they are not recommended for sane human designers.
I wonder if the computerized machine tool manufacturers have thought about this? This is the general trend in automated manufaturing systems anyway, the ever increasing rate of production and the need to reduce overhead costs have always conflicted. To still be able to telemeterize whole systems to minimize downtime could use a small self contained unit such as this. I have always been interested in a CNC machine tool control system that would run on linux. as the current systems all run on purely propriatary operating sysyems or even (gag) M$ win98 or some such, it would be nice to run an open source control as the current controls are bulky and often designed by engineers or computer software companies with no concept of real world necessities or possibilities. A completly open-source, compact control would be a blessing to every real machinist out there.
-- Defenestrate Microsoft!
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"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
Look, it seems like it's pretty fast. Looking at the PDF of the spec sheet, a VGA controller would be fairly trivial to add. It's already got IDE and networking.
So how about a simple, cheap, desktop machine, with (say) basic web, email, word processing and spreadsheet software? A simple little box available for about £200, kind of like an Amstrad PCW for the 21st century.
Unless you're doing huge amounts of audio, video or 3d graphics, or playing processor-heavy games, you just don't need the latest £1500 Gig-everything PC. Some people just want to send email and type up letters, and don't want a huge box with more cooling fans than a Citroen XM.
I can imagine it quite well. Which is why I don't plan to do it. Still the potential is interesting. I first imagined this application when Slashdot ran an ad on matchbox computers. Problem then was that such a tiny device cost $1400. Another actual problem with the way I describe it, is that to go "inline" into an ethernet line, it really needs a hub.
Now we just need a special distro with the right tools, scripts, etc. that fits into that 2MB flash.
Whether I point this out first, or someone else does, it is probably going to happen. I find it interesting that the budget to build such a bug now moves from the realm of national intelligence services to something anyone could build.
--
"Linux is a cancer" -- Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I've got a great application for this device. Similar systems would do what I want, but would cost over $1000.
I've dreamed of being able to "clip" a tiny device onto an ethernet port (or even put it inside the wall box behind the faceplate) and have it run dsniff and or mailsnarf. Then at 2am it would e-mail the day's results to a throwaway hotmail account, or irc into a secret channel, or somesuch.
This device could be called a "bug". But now with an SOC that costs $75, someone good with a soldering iron could probably build a bug for $150. This puts such a computer network bug within the budget of a teenage hacker. Wonderful. Just imagine the potential.
--
"Linux is a cancer" -- Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
here that already does all that for you.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Now we just need to stuff these into Legos and we can RULE THE WORLD (Insert maniacal laugh here)!!!!!!!!!!!!
You can't take the sky from me
Now all I need is a half a million bucks and I'd have the potential for one hell of a beowulf cluster... so... who wants to pitch in?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Linux controlled tooth brush?
Is there a reason the crystal has to be external? They have put everything else on the thing...
Ah but you gotta remember, they said the same thing about microchips. I remember reading in Fire in the Valley about how a lot of the early producers of microchips didn't see PCs in the future for their product, but rather they thought that the chips would be used in things like blenders and other random home appliances, and for the most part that hasn't really worked out. The washing machine hasn't evolved all that much in the last 50 years.
Hmmm, seems like one or two early posters seem to think that we will see these chips in desktop PCs (asking about USB, ATA, SCSI support, etc). But if you expect to find these ETRAX system-on-chip units in a desktop PC, then you'll be looking in the wrong place - because they'll be in embedded systems.
With 8MB SDRAM and 2MB Flash memory, these chips could be running your next souped-up GPS device, your next smart (landline) phone, your internet-savvy fridge, your second generation PVR, etc, etc.
As we move to a "chips in everything" society, lower power, highly integrated processors like this one will run countless devices. Today they may cost $50, tomorrow they will cost a fraction of that and will be just about everywhere.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Indeed. Fortunately, I had the distinctive pleasure of being able to put this guy's pink slip right into his inbox the next day.
WOW, I am glad I don't work for you and I feel very bad for anyone who does. Not only are you closed minded about new ideas, but you fire people for having new ideas and to top that off you aren't even man enough to fire them in person, you send them email. Nice Guy
I know I should not feed the trolls, some times I can not resist.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power - Benito Mussoli
1. It doesn't matter how blank-boxed they are, as long as they are small and cheap?
2. There isn't a huge interest in hacking computers per se; rather, what we care about is modularity-for-the-buck? (I suspect this is the case for me: what I want are things I can buy for under $100US that can be hooked to other things in the same price range in some meaningful way to build (random-string (cons '(a gravity meter) '(an automatic bubble maker) '(a marsupial trap) '(a woodpecker conditioner) future-projects-list)).
3. Most people here only read every fifth thread these days?
-- MarkusQ
maybe in the future they can make the mhz a bit bigger and this thing can be implemented into the everyday-appliances... in the near future we might hear: "my tv is running @ 600 mhz and has slackware"
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"I believe in karma. That means I can do bad things to people and assume they deserve it" - Dogbert
I was just wondering, what would you ever need this for? Maybe someone will build a beowolf cluster of a billion of them, but that is about it.
D/\ Gooberguy
Karma: Meh (Mostly from meh.)
how hard would it be to somehow hook up a pcmcia socket to it ? just thinking, this could be a nice and cheap way to make a wireless/wired bridge or even a wireless repeater to get around things like mountains. powered by solar panels and some battery setup, it could work quite nicely.