[rescue] Vaxen?

[James Lockwood]

On Mon, 29 Apr 2002, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:

> Eerrr, if anyone knows how to get a Virtex and a PCB board (with all those
> traces, since you guys are going to put a bunch of simms in that thing..)
> for $50.00, please let me know....

PCBExpress for the boards, by qty 20 things get cheap quickly.  7 mil
spacing is fine for this app.  I'm not sure if I'd actually use a Virtex,
there are other cheaper alternatives that would work here.

Never doubt the power of free samples for misc parts.  Maxim is your
friend.  :)

> Maybe I have spent way too much time in the hardware side of things, but
> it seems that you people have waaaaay to much free time (and are a bit
> overoptimistic). For something as useless as a solid state disk, with

There's only one key benefit to solid state disk over system RAM:
stability.  A dedicated device with dedicated firmware is in theory more
immune to any action that will bring the host system down, and should
retain its contents through just about anything.  This is the reason
they're still used for logging/journaling devices.

$50 would be tough to hit in low qty.  $75-100 would definitely be doable.
XCV50E-6CS144C is $33 in qty 1, drops to $20 quickly.  LVDS I/O, mmm.

> Just my 2 cents, I spent another allnighter debugging VHDL code, and I
> realized by reading this thread how sick some of you are! :-)

Want an async multi-megabit RS232 state machine that fits in half of a
9572?  :)

-James