Hi Jeremy,
On 29 October 2012 15:16, Jeremy Bennett jeremy.bennett@embecosm.com wrote:
Hi all,
For those who haven't seen, Parallella got funded on KickStarter - a total of just under $900k raised. For those who would like to hear more, I'll be talking about the project at OSHUG on 15th November.
As part of my reward package, I'll receive 8 Epiphany III (16-core) bare chips in December. I have neither the skills or facilities to use these, so I am open to any OSHUG suggestions for putting them to a good use. I'm sure some of you have both the skills and facilities to do something creative with them.
The Adapteva website says these are "324-ball 15x15mm flip-chip BGA" [1] but doesn't mention the pitch? Perhaps it's implicit — my knowledge of BGA devices goes as far as appreciating that they are difficult for hobbyists to work with. In any case, if it were 1mm or higher it seems you could get a small four layer board done fairly cheaply [2], and perhaps this could just do breakout and be used to hook one up to an FPGA dev board. However, from a quick calculation it looks like the pitch has to be 0.8mm or under.
Wondering if Omer, Sukkin, or Al have any ideas, as they've far more experience with this sort of thing ...
As a last resort we could try the "quit whining and solder" technique :o)
http://eds.dyndns.org/~ircjunk/images/bga-adapt2.jpg
Best,
Andrew
[1] http://www.adapteva.com/products/silicon-devices/e16g301/ [2] http://siliconexposed.blogspot.de/2012/07/bga-process-notes.html