Smaller, energy efficient turbo card for A1200

[Oli_hd]

've been pondering whether it would be possible to create i.e. a 030/040 compatible but more compact and energy efficient turbo card for the A1200 that would fit nicely inside the standard desktop case?

If you did a board that ran totally at 3.3V then it would use less power. Freescale make a few 3V 68K's... I havent looked but as the 68060's core is 3.3V I bet the IO bank could be run at 3.3V too.
You would just need some buffers that can drive a TTL signal and accept 5V logic levels.
As for sticking an FPGA on board for SCSI or SD, yup it could be done, opencores.org have a few designs as do Xilinx and lattice. (Heck a PIC can interface to an SD card)

As for making a more compact card... well I dunno, unless you can get some of the old 208 pin QFP 68060's that are out of production now the 060 is always going to stand tall.
The rest of the logic would be surface mount and chips in the TSSOP and TQFP packages stand only a few mm off the board. Space wise adding connectors is what takes up the space, mount the memory on to the PCB (8 chips normally) and you would save yourself a bit of space.
You could go mad and do a 8 or 10 layer PCB and make a card that looks more like the Amijoe was, a card full of chips with the tracks routed on the layers below but then your talking about a lot of expense.
I would say KISS, 3.3V the CPU board, mount some SD-Ram on the board itself (available from Digikey) and if you want SD card readers or SCSI why not add a USB host chip and use that? I think the overall cost of such a board would be low, except the 060, but you could sell it with a socket so people could hunt around, ripping Atari's to shreds for the 060 ;-)

[Oli_hd]

You'd need an FPGA/CPLD for your 680x0 bus compatible SD-RAM controller.

Actually there is, I dont have the spec here at work but give me a couple of hours and I will be home.
That said a CPLD one would be easier, Xilinx give away the VHDL code for use on Xilinx chips. (They have DDR ones too but on a 50Mhz bus thats pointless)

It is still too complicated for anyone not in the electronics industry. You yourself tried to do a Coldfire board several times and was never totally successful.

Well you could use the Haynie archive PAL code from the 3640, stick it in a CPLD (using Abel) and then alter it.
The full design is available, even though the 3640 wasnt the most pimped up CPU card ever made.

producing volumes of less than 100 would still not be economically viable.

Well I ordered a slab 14.5" by 10" yesterday, two layer (yup, not suitable for high speed CPU designs, 4 layers would be needed but..) with solder mask and silk screen, inc postage and all fee's for £70 all in. fit as many designs/boards on as you can.
It aint an expensive thing to try if someone wanted.
plus you can still buy PLCC CPLD's so you dont have to play with tiny SMD things.

[Oli_hd]

Sorry about not posting when I got home, I got errors on the a.org site when I went to post (Just one line of text something like "reply can not be posted"), mehh.
The 68060 SD-Ram chip was made by Vcubed and was/is called the V380SDC, supports 2gig of SD-Ram, an i2c interface needed for DIMM modules (Well not needed but a standard part of) and designed for the 68040+, PPC's and others.
The company sold over 10,000 of this chip in a year (Probably rather low but getting it wasnt easy from what I saw)

The down side is Vcubed went bankrupt, the IP was bought by Quicklogic and the new company no longer seem to make the SDRam chip (Only PCI bridges from Vcubed) but they are still available on the net, just may not be wise to do a new design using them.

Linky to news item
Datasheet for chip