[Arm-netbook] eoma and qimod

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 8:07 PM, Christopher Havel
<laserhawk64 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Two things, that I'd like to contribute.
>
> A new-name suggestion, if it comes to that...
>
> "Open Modular Card System", stylized "OMCaS". (Pronounced AHM-cass) It's,
> from what I can tell, a fairly accurate descriptor, and the acronym is
> fairly catchy.
>
> ...and an idea for further expansion. Rather than have a single CPU card
> that plugs into a carrier board with lots of stuff, why not have *multiple*
> cards -- both as the "motherboard" and as the expansion cards...? ;) Key
> them differently, and then all you need is a mostly-passive backplane
> ("mostly" because it would obviously break out some of the ports) and a pile
> of Cardbus connectors.
>
> What do you all think?

 hi chris,

 lots going on here, very briefly i'd like to share an idea which is
inspired by the HTC Universal phone and it could do with modernising.
we never identified the chip name, we called it "ASIC3" but it was
basically an I/O break-out IC, with 32 GPIOs, 2 UARTs, 3 SPIs and more
besides.  it was memory-addressable (so just like NAND flash ICs and
the DM9000 Ethernet IC).

 what we are missing in the modern low-power embedded devices world is
the equivalent of this IC with more modern interfaces (extra USBs,
video screen outputs and so on) a kind of low-power embedded
equivalent of the AT/XT/PCI backplane concept on which, chris, your
idea is somewhat dependent.

 my feeling is that there should be a market for an IC that is
USB3-based which has a stack of functionality such as GPIO, A/D, DAC,
PWMs, USB2s, SPIs, SD/MMCs and even an RGB/TTL and other LCD outputs.
apart from being only USB2-based, some of ATMEL's embedded Cortex
range _almost_ qualify *on their own*, and ICubeCorp's IC likewise
might almost qualify as it has enough CPU horsepower to do
decompression of LCD output data to fit over a USB2 bus.

anyway. i read what everyone has been writing, i have to absorb, think
but not too much, focus on the contract i'm doing, keep doing the PCB
designs, and wait for responses from my associates, see if they come
around.

l.