Posted on May 01, 2012 at 23:27Cost is a factor of using a niche part, DigiKey is always about twice as expensive as dealing with the mfg directly. The semi mfgs are moving to built-to-order, with long delivery times, and killing older lines and unprofitable products.
DIMMs aren't something typically seen on embedded micros, except perhaps some eval boards, you could look at some embedded PC boards. Embedded micro's tend to utilize a handful of SDRAM chips, tightly coupled. The kind of pin counts needed to interface to a DIMM gets you back to your packaging issue, the routing of a PCB is also significantly challenging for 100-133+ MHz signals.
The chips on the DIMMs are often just 16-bit wide SDRAM's, Micron offers these as 100 or 133 MHz in TSOP packages. When you get to DDR2 or DDR3 you're back in BGA land.
You could take a look at ST's older SPEAr parts, problematic because of the BGA, but mentioned because it's their site.
I'd look at some FreeScale ColdFire or Kinetis, NXP LPC32xx, or ATMEL AT91SAM9xxx parts. I'd go dig but you have some tight cost and packaging limitations. You're basically going to be looking at ARM9 devices, capable of running WinCE or Linux, at perhaps 200-400 MHz, for older tech that was built in enough volume to be lower cost, and still available. Most of this market is now chasing ARM A9 designs in phones and tablets.
