Hi,
Somehow I missed this tread, so I'll clarify the situation with LPC2888 and I hope you will understand.
LPC2888 is the most complex board we have made as technological challenge and as complexity and as incomplete documentation we ever dealt so far. I also appreciate all the help we got from NXP gurus and I confess that without their excellent support we would never be able to finish this board (we were in correspondence with over 6 NXP engineers from California to China who provide us with all documents available in NXP about this project).
The development work started in June 2006 and was sucessfully finished May 2007 so we worked on this board 11 months, yes there were anoncements on our web that it will be released September 2006 then October 2006 then March - April 2007 I guess we have been too optimistic
I appreciate the patience all you had and the number of e-mails showing interest for this board.
The truth is that we had to go through dozen of PCB prototypes and revisions of the board caused by number of reasons.
The only alternative board for this chip is from Nohau and those who have spent $1200 have probably found later that on Nohau boards the SDRAM is working only up to 30 Mhz , on our final prototype we made the SDRAM works on the maximum LPC2888 frequency 60 MHz without problems.
There are not well known problems with the on chip DC/DC converter which works on 1 Mhz and cause lot of torubles to other parts in the MCU including some side effects like if you run the LPC2888 once on internal DC/DC with 1.5V single cell source it burns something inside the chip and you can't use external power supply anymore but only the internal 1.5V DCDC.
For those who are familiar with the Nohau schematic just ask yourself why Nohau placed 2 external DC/DC convertors when the chip have internal DCDC? But to be objective I will confess that Nohau board works well with the both internal and external DCDC converters, so obviously the internal DCDC may be used correctly with properly routed board.
On our latest prototype this DCDC again behaved weird, but we just decide to make one final attempt to route it differenlty (note that even if you change track routing with 1 cm it gives totaslly different picture on the scope), so if it will not work as needed on this final revision of the board we'll just disable it and tell anybody to not use it with our board unless he wants to power the boards with only 1.5V
So the blank boards will be ready in days and we start the assembly. I'll keep you in touch and crossing my fingers to have sucess with the DCDC so to have everything working on the final release.
Best regards
Tsvetan
