Hi,
Mobile devices and many tablets use System on Chip, which I guess highly powerful equivalent of microcontroller. But many SoC manufacturers I searched do not sell chips without bulk order and do not give datasheet without signing some legal mumbo jumbo. And needless to say, price of the development kit also sky high. But is there any manufacturer who offers cheap SoC(preferably MIPS archi.) with small order and also cheap development kit for educational purposes?

Thanks in advance.

 

on a chip? what specs?
there are cortex processors, datasheets etc are available, just check website of manufacturers like stm etc.

otherwise raspberry pie... when it hits the shelves

 

SoC basically means you get the processor, ram and maybe some flash in one package, which saves board space in mobile devices. Other than that, I don´t see any reason to bother with them, especially when you say small project. Just find a processor or normal evaluation board that suits your needs.

 

Hey even I was lookin for some cheap SoC to build my own hardware and experiment porting linux and all. I came across this site which provides arm9 SoC and development kit. May be it may help you,
http://www.arm9board.net/
If you want to build your own hardware, I found that freescale i.mx233 processor is the cheapest arm9 processor and is also available in LQFP Package.



-Ravi

<SNIP>

 

Hey even I was lookin for some cheap SoC to build my own hardware and experiment porting linux and all. I came across this site which provides arm9 SoC and development kit. May be it may help you,
http://www.arm9board.net/
If you want to build your own hardware, I found that freescale i.mx233 processor is the cheapest arm9 processor and is also available in LQFP Package.



-Ravi

<SNIP>

Well, Ravi, you gave me a kind of solution. Thanks a lot. My project is quite similar to yours. And I guess I can buy a kit from http://www.arm9board.net/ and buy a standalone processor and make my project on it. I'll be very happy with that.
But it would've been so much greater, if I find a very small chip that at least integrates 32 to 64 MB Memory to the processor. The primary condition of my project is making the device as small as possible(just like mobile). In a sentence, I want to make a medium tier multimedia mobile(think of cheap but flashy Chinese mobile phone brands, i.e. Micromax, Kingstar) without communication capability. I hope you got my point, Ravi. But still ARM9BOARD provides great solution, though their SoCs are quite large. Thanks a lot again.

Thanks to everyone else, also. Raspberry Pi is alright. But I cann't program them, even they can't provide the datasheets(See their FAQ), thanks to Broadcomm.

 

Hey I am glad that my post was of some help to you. If you want memory with a processor then you have to go for processors which come with pop memory so your size constraint may get solved.

-Ravi

<SNIP>