Solid State Disk replacement for RD53, 54, RK05, RL02/02

On Mar 10, 2010, at 9:56 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote: I've done budgetary pricing for my next set of boards and a quad sized board 4 layers with gold edge connectors, solder mask and silkscreen (I'm no where near the hole limit) was running ~$60-90/ea for a run of 25 boards. That also includes doing electrical tests for the boards. I've found that a quad board fills up pretty quickly when you start adding the various regulators (it's sad that you need as many as 3 or 4 different voltages), unibus transceivers, level shifters, etc, etc (I do everything in LVTTL since those parts are more obtainable but typically not 5v tolerant). Going 4 layers makes routing *so* much easier and you get better signal integrity. I'd like to see someone put together a board for $200 (complete). For unibus, you can need upwards of 10 transceiver chips and the last time I could find them they were $7/ea. Just for the bare fab + transceivers you're well towards $150 and haven't done anything yet. As far as SMT goes, I'm not up to soldering 208pin QFPs or 0603s so add in assembly costs too. Typically, what I've been doing is that the transceivers are the only thru-hole parts and *maybe* a connector (some connectors are better thru-hole because of mechanicals). In the end, assembled boards that do anything interesting is probably closer to $500 than $200 depending upon what you want to do on the board (ie what you do once you get past all the interface gunk). When I do boards, I don't do junk drawer stuff. It's all new (not scavenged) parts. You'd be surprised how fast all the little stuff adds up. TTFN - Guy