Planning/design/review for a 6-layer Xilinx Artix-7 board for DIY computer.

[Vuong]

Do you sell your SOBA_RIVA board ?
Artix-7 with 8G SO-DIMM is exactly what I try to buy but seem like nobody doing this.
If not, do you mind to share your hardware design, is it opensource?
Thanks

[asmi]

Do you sell your SOBA_RIVA board ?

That board has some deficiencies, the most important of which is that can not use QSPI flash to save/load the bitstream (or anything else for that matter), so it makes no sense to sell it. I have 4 PCBs of Rev B1 remaining, which has a minor flaw (SCL/SDA lines are swapped for some parts), which I fixed for B2 revision, but I haven't actually ordered PCBs for that revision yet because I was able to bodge-fix issue of B1 on my assembled board.

As for selling it commercially, I never seriously considered it because it's going to be too expensive for most hobbyists, while professionals can design such a board by themselves - it's actually quite simple.

Artix-7 with 8G SO-DIMM is exactly what I try to buy but seem like nobody doing this.

It's not very often that you need so much RAM with Artix designs. I wanted to do it more for the challenge than for actual practical utility - though having such wide memory interface does provide a lot of bandwidth for video applications. Another unusual thing was that implementing an SO-DIMM is the only way to get MIG to implement a dual-rank memory system (MIG for Ultrascale and US+ does support multi-rank interfaces directly). Practically speaking, in my designs I needed more bandwidth as opposed to higher capacity, but SO-DIMM gives both, so it's hard to complain really, and also it's much less PITA to assemble and cheaper to boot (2-4-8G SODIMM DDR3(L)'s cost next to nothing).

If not, do you mind to share your hardware design, is it opensource?

It was designed in Altium Designer, so I'm not really sure how to share it properly without dragging all my libraries along with it. I've posted the full schematics earlier in this thread, so one can use it as a basis for their own design because layout is not very complicated, and schematics has been proven to work via my prototypes.

Also I plan to make a series of videos explaining how to design a board like that one, hopefully I will get around to do that shortly.

[BrianHG]

It was designed in Altium Designer, so I'm not really sure how to share it properly without dragging all my libraries along with it.

Libraries should not be needed, just the PCB file as Altium should store a copy of the components used inside the PCB and schematic files.  Libraries should only be needed to edit or modify key components.  At least, this was the method with older versions of Altium.

Or, if you do not want to release your source design, a gerber CAM output should suffice.

[asmi]

Libraries should not be needed, just the PCB file as Altium should store a copy of the components used inside the PCB and schematic files.  Libraries should only be needed to edit or modify key components.  At least, this was the method with older versions of Altium.

Ok, that's good to know. I will give it a try once I have some spare time - my kid is currently in the hospital, so I spend all my time there or at work.

Or, if you do not want to release your source design, a gerber CAM output should suffice.

I presume these are going to be of limited utility unless assembly files/BOM are also provided. This board has over 500 components, so assembling such a board is going to take a long time. For me it took 2 full days - one day per side, but I was using reflow oven, so it's just placement which took so long. But to be fair I wasn't really going for speed in that one, so I took my time with multiple breaks, took turns with my wife, etc. - since I'm using room temperature-stable solder paste, there was never any rush to place parts before paste dries out - because it does not.

[ali_asadzadeh]

asmi , you can share Altium projects without the Library, also GitHub could be a very cool friend to share the files there.