Status of Hawkboard?

[dspfan]

Dear colleagues,
traffic on Hawkboard website has slowed down, new information about
status of Hawkboard is rare.
Last week there was an interesting information about a Hawkboard clone
by TI China. As far as I understood the clone is identical to the
India Hawkboard with the exception of the L138 package. There was no
information concerning the layout of the clone. The clone seems to be
stable.
In the TI e2e L138 forum there is some information that the DDR
interface of the L138 seems to be a little bit difficult. All these
informations are very important for people who want (or have to)
design with the L138 which is a very useful device.
It would be very interesting to know why the announced (15 of march)
Hawkboard revision is not available up to now.
Best regards
dspfan

[Huy Pham]

dspfan,

Thank you for the timely email and raising an important question.

From our testing so far, we have found a few design violations to the Hawkboard design:

• Do not use separate ground for DDR and other digital logic. Can be same solid ground plane
• Do not use separate power for DDR. Can be same as VCC_1V8D.
• Move all DDR routing to layers 1 and 3, adjacent to solid ground on plane 2

We believe these design violations could erratically cause some instability. For why this instability does not occur on other Hawkboards,  we are undergoing more testing. Remember that the original Hawkboard used industrial memories of DDR, so that could be a contributing factor.

We are in the process of building new boards up with the design violations fixed. After testing to make sure everything is up and running, we will post the known good design up for this community. 

I thank you for being so patient. In the meantime, if you have a board that you're building, I recommend you contact us for a schematic review.

best regards,

Huy Pham

OMAP-L Manager