[Arm-netbook] EOMA-68. again.

[lkcl luke]

ok, i'm looking at the pinouts again.

two things occurred to me:

1) RGB/TTL has an "enable" pin, VSYNC and HSYNC.  these pins are not
very high frequency (clock and data are however).

2) I2C is only a max of 4mhz.

therefore, there's no real need to separate RGB/TTL from anything *if*
the enable pin, vsync and hsync are placed near something that's not
so high frequency.

i2c isn't high frequency, and neither are the GPIOs.

therefore, i think... it may be possible to convert 4 of the GND pins
into signals.

which would leave enough to do either something like 4-bit SPI or
perhaps even allocate them to optional gigabit ethernet.

i believe the same trick applies to EOMA-CF.

what do people think?

also, is it worthwhile dropping the number of GPIO pins (perhaps to
15, 14 or even 12) to make room for an SD/MMC interface?

personally i'm leaning towards the optional gigabit ethernet: you can
do more with that - i think you get more bang-per-buck.

but, it means that SoCs with no gigabit ethernet, those 4 wires are
wasted (no options allowed! that's the rule of standards!
upwards-compatibility is ok though)

choices, choices.... thoughts anyone?

l.