PCB Boards for STM32F429 176 pin or 208 pin versions?

[gbarbour]

Posted on April 30, 2014 at 23:56

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Hello,

I would like to design a product based on the STM32F429 chip. I first thought I could do it with the Disco board but there are not enough free I/Os for me to use that unless I use some of the I/Os to drive serial bus expander chips.

I would like to know if anyone knows of any boards, or board designs, that use the 176 or 208 pin versions of this great little MCU?

Scmartboard has an adapter board that might work. (

http://www.schmartboard.com/index.asp?page=products_qfp&id=116

)

But I am wondering if there is anything else available that would let me use the larger versions of this chip without designing my own board for it.

Thank you.

#stm32f429 #discovery #pcb

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on May 01, 2014 at 03:47

I'm looking for things myself, the best hope perhaps is WaveShare, their

http://www.wvshare.com/product/XCore407I.htm

seems to be a good model, and I expect them to make a 429i version at some time. If not perhaps the form factor is appealing to you. Or perhaps you have the staff/equipment to desolder the 407 and place a 429, doesn't get you the SDRAM. I'm not hot for the straight LQFP breakout, it gets you to the pins, but getting to SDRAM is still going to be problematic. Perhaps a breakout with the 176-pin top side, and SDRAM bottom side? The STM324x9I-EVAL uses the BGA, and a very expensive multi-layer PCB, still it uses a couple of I2C IO Expanders for some low bandwidth signals There's the

https://www.aimagin.com/fio-2.html

, which uses the STM32F4-DISCO form factor with another row of pin headers.

[stm322399]

Posted on May 01, 2014 at 16:24

Could you be interested in a SODIMM module with F427 (or 429) BGA176, 4/8MB of SDRAM, Ethernet PHY, 16MB NOR Flash, and enough I/O on SODIMM to connect SDIO, DCMI(or LCD, they share pins), UART, I2C, CAN, SPI, ADC, plus some generic I/O ?

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on May 01, 2014 at 18:10

Run into to things like these

http://www.dsp-systeme.net/en/XynergyXS-stm32-cortex-m4-spartan-6-module

http://www.geeseware.com/1-50/Home.htm

[stm322399]

Posted on May 01, 2014 at 18:32

You got it. That's exactly the kind of thing I am currently building.

It has no FPGA and is primarily intended for building IEC 61131-3 compliant devices. But the hardware being there, the module can be used for generic purposes as well. Clive, do you have an idea how much they cost ?

[Mark Edwards]

Posted on May 01, 2014 at 22:40

I have a design that I am happy to make public if anyone is interested. The complete PCB has 2X429’s (176pin) and 2 Cycloneiii FPGA’s. The reason I haven’t already is there are a few things that need to be fixed in the next version i.e. 6 layer PCB not 4, when designing DMA’d GPIO’s triggered by a Timer you need memory to memory DMA channel not memory to peripheral, JTAG RST error. But other than these, the design as working well beyond my expectations. So whilst it isn’t perfect (yet) it could act as a base to someone designing their own.

Also have looked at githum and sourceforge but these seem to be software rather than PCB design.

The design is in Altium but could screenshot the separate pages although the filesize limit on the forum is a problem.

I have managed to export the data to a pdf and will try and attach it.

________________ Attachments : 429board1A.pdf : https://st--c.eu10.content.force.com/sfc/dist/version/download/?oid=00Db0000000YtG6&ids=0680X000006I13P&d=%2Fa%2F0X0000000bhw%2F6kqNFoiiEAvM4sVnmgXPRuVvmda.2WadDjF1.nU02jU&asPdf=false

[Mark Edwards]

Posted on May 01, 2014 at 22:49

Wow, that seems to have worked.

Clive, for all the help you have given me with your various posts I will happily send you one of my spare boards populated (with one CPU and FPGA, as that’s all I have spare at the moment) to your requirements if you want it, gratis.

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on May 02, 2014 at 01:34

@laurent - No I haven't priced these, I swear I ran into a different STM32 DIMM design the other day, but can't make Google find it for me again. One of my problems with having that much external hardware attached is the slowness and architectural limits of the M3/M4, I have other designs I'm working on with ARM9 devices in the 400-500 MHz, 128 MB of DDR3 and real caches. With things like the Beagle Bone, Mars Board, Intel Galileo, A5 Xplain'd I think $80-90 seems where things are at.

@tede, yes I'd like to take a look, we tend to look to other boards, and some of the cheaper boards out of China to evaluate design aspects as it's cheaper than prototyping, and most of the components we want to use are just impossible to deal with outside of a PCB (fine pitch BGA and uDFN), so we do a lot of upfront analysis of design elements, and then build an integrated board with really high probability first time around success. The 16-bit SDRAM looks quite interesting. Please contact me at sourcer32@gmail.com

[stm322399]

Posted on May 02, 2014 at 09:48

Clive, I wholeheartedly agree that managing too many devices lead to reach some limits (I am struggling with SDRAM BW for a while).

That's exactly why we also make compatible SODIMM modules based on iMX cpu. Indeed we started with iMX, then derived that work with STM32F4. The two designs have enough differences (Linux+more SDRAM for iMX, FreeRTOS for STM32F4), to justify that both exists and don't really compete.

[gbarbour]

Posted on May 03, 2014 at 18:43 Clive, I looked at those two boards you suggested and am considering them. I have spent a great deal of time since I first posted the question investigating hundreds of different Eval boards somewhat comparable to the 429-Disco. I like the two boards you suggested along with the following: http://microcontrollershop.com/product_info.php?cPath=154_170_279&products_id=5664&osCsid=3poaqv97aar69oml4j0c6tv7d1 and http://microcontrollershop.com/product_info.php?cPath=154_170_279&products_id=6059&osCsid=1snotdr4a82p29jd7s6u44c7g4 and http://microcontrollershop.com/product_info.php?cPath=154_170_279&products_id=5353&osCsid=u3gcg7mh9u8rrffpbs9sk82uc4 I also contacted Waveshare to see if they had anything planned for the STM32F429 chip and they said they were working on a board for the 429 Disco board and sent me a photo of it. (See the attachment.) The person emailing didn't know if they were working on a board for the 176 pin version of the chip but would find out and get back with me. Thanks for your advice. ________________ Attachments : WVShr-429I.jpg : https://st--c.eu10.content.force.com/sfc/dist/version/download/?oid=00Db0000000YtG6&ids=0680X000006I10Z&d=%2Fa%2F0X0000000bhx%2FVJrDfSeFATri1aJ5Wbu0YWyxbTBu9xE90ihxyYNR8Hc&asPdf=false