Securing a SoC is Not Easy
pandoralive.info
pandoralive.info
I thought it was going to be security related.
Of course, merely procuring the part itself is just the beginning. The early revisions of a SoC (and in many cases even small microcontrollers) can have fairly extensive errata sheets (basically a list of known hardware bugs). If you aren't a first class customer (usually based on order volumes), this is a world where you can spend weeks to months wondering why your code doesn't work only to find out that it legitimately was a hardware problem in the silicon.
Trying to source displays is also a nightmare for relatively low volume (<100K) designs.
There are a lot of other electronic parts that are like that. If you get to talk and have a relationship with the right people you can get samples and support. Otherwise it can be virtually un-obtainium if it's not in Digikey's inventory. It's always been like that...
Unfortunately, I'd say they are the exception. Good luck even getting someone at Broadcom or Qualcomm to speak to you. If your projected volumes are not (convincingly) into at least hundreds of thousands, you will get a simple "no", if you even manage to get an answer at all.
Not sure if these offer the level of detail/support that folks here are looking for, but they seem like a good start.
It kinda makes sense not to sell these in small quantities because the SoC manufacturer would either end up getting lots of support requests or they would get a bad reputation for ignoring support. The reason is that unlike in the x86 world where there's some kind of a "standard" (derived from the IBM PC), ARM SoCs don't have any kind of consistent ecosystem where the motherboard components, firmware, etc would be specified. Every ARM SoC boots in a different manner, they might have separate bootloaders and there's a whole lot of SoC specific code in the Linux kernel.
Of course, the SoC manufacturer might be able to release documentation about the chip, but that kind of documentation might not exist (in a neat package that can actually be released and not e.g. an intranet wiki), it might contain sensitive IP (lawyers would have to get involved) or it might be written in a foreign language (and translating technical documentation from Chinese or Korean is not cheap either).
For the industry to mature and move forward, a common standard for SoCs would be a very welcome development.
Disclosure: I work as a SW engineer in a SoC company but I have no connection to the sales department and don't really know how this works in practice.
This is a real shame in the SoC market right now - so many great products could be being made if only the chip mfr's were paying attention to the little guys. Its why companies like ACME Systems (http://www.acmesystems.it/) are working hard on providing SoC's and SoM's to the little guys - for a fair price - but its also why they have a fixed-price policy (no matter what quantity: the same price.) This has the advantage (for the hardware developers) of having access to the chips in small quantities, but it eats the margins when the quantities get larger (>10k), because the price will be the same.
This is an area where a new startup could really come along and eat everyones' lunch. Ignoring the little guys is going to hurt the Samsung and Nvidia's of this market, but I suppose they know that already and its why they price/set policy that will exclude newcomers to the scene ..
Currently selling a small batch of chips (even individual ones) to someone makes no sense because the customer would be unable to do anything with the chip simply because they wouldn't know how it works without support or documentation (which costs money to create and maintain). The small players market (all of them, combined) is not worth enough money to put the effort in. We can argue about the PR value (among geeks) but that's not deemed valuable by management at this point.
It's certainly not about ignoring or setting price points to exclude little guys, it's about running a business for profit.
If and when we get some kind of a standard for SoCs and it becomes viable that you can build a motherboard and put any ARM SoC in it, it will also become sensible to sell them like commodity products but the industry as a whole is not at that stage.
As there is very fierce competition among the individual SoC manufacturers and very little co-operation takes place, I think that ARMH is pretty much the only ones in the position to make any such development.
I don't like the way the industry works at the moment but that's just the way it is. Maybe it will some day mature and stabilize.
That's why most chips are priced out of reach of small companies. Even if they have something revolutionary they may never get the chance to get started without a huge risk.
The folks who embrace selling in small quantities to the individual developers see a huge diversity in designs that are built with their tech, that trains up the tech provider on the strong and weak points of the technology and often helps them produce easier to implement solutions. The diversity of designs trains the consumers on possibilities which they may not be considering. When they connect, as they did with putting a microprocessor into a "home" computer, the results can be stunning.
So you don't sell 1000 units because you think this guy is going change the world, you sell them in 1000 unit quantities to a bunch of guys and gals because one of them may change the world in a way you haven't foreseen, and if they do, you will benefit hugely from being the tech they used.
Bunnie also suggests learning enough Chinese to participate in what he terms the "gongkai" (公开), the quasi-open but legally murky design and production ecosystem producing much of our electronics, where documentation and specs are apparently available about as freely as torrented episodes of Game of Thrones.
We have had several customers with issues sourcing this way and not realizing their devices are malfunctioning.
You need to be careful when asking for quotes. If Bob has stock of product, and you ask 3 different brokers for quotes, you've just driven cost of that product up.
That's especially frustrating when three or four sub contractors are requesting quotes for the same part to be used for the same potential job being inquired about by the end customer.
More seriously, you get to know people who can get you the information/components you need --- often on various Chinese forums. The "guanxi" mentality ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi ) is very strong in Asia; to get to the company directly takes a lot of incremental "relationship-building".
Unfortunately, they're pretty alone in that regard.
Providing a complete doc set for these chips runs well above 10,000 pages. I recently got to evaluate a Marvell chipset and...um...let's say it wasn't pretty.
Hope this helps!
It's a little different with some of the raspberry pi like platforms on arm but you have some work to do if you want a specific late model processor. Sort of seems like an opportunity of Someone to build arm atx and miniitx like hardware but I don't know anybody doing it. It's all custom application specific stuff anyways...
Parallela board, the Pandora, the iControlPad2 from kick starter failed because of parts not being sourced on time.
(Disclaimer: I'm an OP fan, a first-batch'er, and avid supporter of everything that EvilDragon and his motley crew are getting up to..)
I think the failure also comes from changing the design mid process.
Some use of a search engine is a good thing - it means I'm learning something new.
I'd be happy to provide a glossary, but I risk being fantastically patronising. What in particular was difficult with this post? I ask because I meed to improve the clarity of my communication. Perhaps it was the alphabet soup of different manufacturers and users and devices? Or perhaps it was the lack of a very short introductory paragraph? Or the lack of expansion ofter first use of an initialism?
HN has always been for technical news. There is always some domain specific knowledge required in technical topics. Judging by the comments here though, it's obvious that the domain specific knowledge this article assumes (which isn't particularly great - not much more than a rudimental understanding of the components that make up a computer) overlaps with quite a number of HN readers.
If you read an article that you don't understand, use it as a learning opportunity. The resources are at your fingertips!
Would not these small hardware firms benefit form forming a legal co-op that ordered the SoC in batches of 100,000 and than those batches would be shred among all co-op members?