On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 04:16:03AM -0700, David Griffith wrote: > > I don't think thatt making the flip-chips double-sided will be > desirable. I want to shrink the machine and minimize any need > to reengineer the backplane. By the way, can the backplane of > a straight-eight be realized as a PCB? Replicating that > component without that will suck.
I've not chosen that restriction and would not mind rerouting the backplane if it means 1. that I can shrink the design and 2. if it means I can fit it on a multilayer PCB of suitable size. Now, I've looked at the backplane of a PDP-12 and it looks to be 4 or 5 levels deep at the most and fairly "roomy". So, with my limited experience it doesn't seem impossible to recreate in a 4 layer PCB. I'm not sure what would be a suitable edge connector though, that would probably dictate the size of the flip chips more than anything. Please correct me if I'm talking complete bulls**t. This is all new to me. /P