Highly integrated small, single-sided PCB enables smaller, efficient designs

To remove the traditional design complexity in this space, Microchip Technology has released a new SOM featuring the SAMA5D2 MPU. The ATSAMA5D27-SOM1, containing the recently released ATSAMA5D27C-D1G-CU SiP, simplifies design by combining the non-volatile boot memory, power management, Ethernet PHY and high-speed DDR2 memory onto a small, single-sided PCB. This family of products provides a very flexible design experience whatever the level of expertise. Customers can solder the SOM to their board and take it to production, or it can be utilised as a reference design along with free schematics, design and Gerber files with a complete bill of materials available online. Customers can also transition from the SOM to the SiP or the MPU itself, depending on their design requirements. The ARM® Cortex®-A5-based SAMA5D2 SiP, mounted on the SOM PCB or available separately, integrates 1 Gb DDR2 memory, further simplifying the design by removing the high-speed memory interface constraints from the PCB. The impedance matching is done in the package, not manually during development so that the system will function properly at normal and low-speed operation. Three DDR2 memory sizes (128 Mb, 512 Mb and 1 Gb) are available for the SAMA5D2 SIP and optimized for bare metal, Real-time Operating System (RTOS) and Linux implementations. "SOMs shorten time to market by significantly reducing development time, software coding and debugging, allowing designers to concentrate on their application features," said Alfredo Vadillo, vice president of Microchip's MPU32 business unit. "With this new SOM, customers can get to market faster with the latest technology from Microchip integrated into a single module. They are also getting a proven partner with global support and a long-term supply commitment."