Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Modular FPGA Miner Hardware Design Development
by
Olaf.Mandel
on 04/08/2011, 07:58:53 UTC
[...]
Is everyone ok with Digikey as the preferred supplier?

I am happy with that choice. But please consider avnet for the actual FPGAs and switchers, as they are significantly cheaper. I just had a look at the switchers: there is not much stock (64 and 90, respectively) for the LMZ12010.

I'm wondering about all of these package sizes for the passive components. Were these all chosen intentionally? Particularly strange is the 2220 package. Is there any reason to not reduce this to a more standard 1206? The others are at least standard sizes, but we could probably reduce the number of different sizes to one or two.

For the 390uF electrolytics, we have ones rated for 2.5V on the 1.2V rail and rated for 4V on the 2.5V rail. It would make sense to make them all 4V, right? Maybe even higher...

For the caps in the FPGA section, these are based on the recommendations in the XIlinx PCB design guide. I would opt not to change those. The resistors in the FPGA section were chosen by me: no particular reason for this size, I just wanted something small that should still be able to stand the dissipated power. For the PSU section, li_gangyi chose the component sizes. I replaced all packages with something found in the rcl library (I prefer to have a common look of the symbols and I try not to have several non-standard libraries in the project). If any of the parts there strike you as odd, I either made a mistake when doing the conversion or you should get li_gangyi's input as to his package choices (I am really bad at analogue stuff, so I wouldn't want to comment). As for the MCU section: I replaced most of the choices in O_Shovah's original design with something else. The idea was to minimise the number of different components: for example in several places where 100nF would have been sufficient I wrote 470nF instead so as to use the same parts as for the FPGA.