For those of you who don't know what the .
Those PoPs are basically "RAM chip soldered onto the CPU, and the stack
of both soldered to the PCB". This is used to save PCB footprint and to
avoid having to route tons of extra (sensitive, matched) traces between
the SDRAM and the CPU.
According to the mailing list posts, it seems to be incredibly difficult
to solder the PoP stack due to the way TI has designed the packaging of
the DM3730. If you want more gory details, see
.
It is very sad to see that what appears to be bad design choices at TI
are going to bring the GTA04 project to a halt. The financial hit by
having only 33% yield is already more than the small community can take,
let alone unused parts that are now in stock or even thinking about
further experiments related to the manufacturability of those chips.
If there's anyone with hands-on manufacturing experience on the DM3730
(or similar) TI PoP reading this: Please reach out to the GTA04 guys and
see if there's anything that can be done to help them.
- UPDATE (March 8, 2017):
In an earlier post I was asserting that the GTA04 is open hardware
(which I actually believed up to that point) until some readers have
pointed out to me that it isn't. It's sad it isn't, but still it has
my sympathies.
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