I’ve been looking at doing some designs using the Eurotech Catalyst CPU module board featuring the Intel Atom processor. This component poses some design challenges for Zuken CADSTAR library manager, mainly because there are two connectors used by the module. There is a 220 pin high density interconnect connector, and a 14 pin 2mm square post header for the power supply.
Catalyst Footprint
The origin for the PCB footprint is the center of the high density connector. Generating a bill of materials automatically with all of the hardware and connector bits at design completion can be an issue. What I’ve done in the past is simply assign an attribute whose value is a file path to a text file that includes all the separate bits and pieces needed for using this component. In this way I can automatically create a second level BOM for this component when running the raw BOM report through a post-processing step. However, one thing I haven’t sorted out yet for this part yet is how to generate the origin of the 14pin header for the manufacturing data output. Possibly I need another attribute which defines the relative offset(s) from the component origin of any additional parts that go with this particular footprint. I’m open to suggestions. Supposedly there’s coming soon to a version of CADSTAR the ability to assign multiple part numbers to a single component in order to make a structured second level bill of materials right from the library.
A CADSTAR 10 format library component archive file for the Catalyst module is here. Please check the pin assignments carefully against the datasheet for the module! This hasn’t been proven on any designs just yet. There are some tricky PCB design issues when using this module, primarily due to the very high speed signals on some of the interconnects. This module has two PCIe x 1 expansion ports running at 2.5GHz, 8 USB high speed ports, 2 MMC4 ports (8 data bits @ 48MHz) as well as 1 standard SDIO port, along with LVDS and DVO video ports and Intel HD audio, among other things. Controlled impedance, differential pair routing and skew control will be necessary when deploying this component. If you have Zuken PREditor HS then you’ll be all set!
-Jeff
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