> I have a question for the seasoned systems engineers. Whats the lowest cost CPU >to design in a custom control board that would handle > say 16 meg RAM, 8 meg Flash, IDE controller, 2 serial ports, keyboard port. This CPU >would also need to be able to run LINUX. Running at 25 > to 200 MHZ. Other items like USB, ethernet and so on could be added but the >mentioned items are for a minimum system. > My vote would be the STPC by STMicro. It is highly integrated and sells for about $30 ea in volume. It has a PCI bus for expansion and that is important if you want to add Ethernet as PCI ethernet chips are the lowest cost. The downside is that the core is essentially a Cyrix 486 CPU. Although they do run it at 133 mhz. Look for details at http://www.st.com. I looked long at it before choosing the MediaGx from National. The MediaGx offers considerably more horsepower but at a higher price point. It comes in a two chip set and costs about 50% more, but offers about 4 times the performance (200 mhz 586). Downside is that it requires a 64 bit memory interface. Look for it at http://www.nsc.com. Both of these designs require some sort of super I/O chip for serial/keyboard. Figure about $4 for that. Slightly higher if you need a RTC. And, there's a new kid on the block, ZF Embedded, who is now offering a chip called the MachZ. It has everything including serial and keyboard/mouse, ide, etc in one package. The only thing it lacks is video. The two I mentioned above come with VGA interfaces. If you don't want video, check it out at http://www.zfmicro.com. It offers similar performance to the STPC, is slightly more expensive, but requires no extra super I/O chip. If has a couple of really cool manufacturing enhancements for helping with flash programming after PCB assembly. Look at the zTag feature. They also maintain a small amount of boot memory right on chip in case your flash completely dies. They're a small company and trying hard to get design wins. -Corwin -- To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the command "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the message body. For more information, see <http://waste.org/mail/linux-embedded>.
