[Oberon] New FPGA Oberon board

[skulski at pas.rochester.edu]

Chris:

> https://oshpark.com/
> I used them to make the daughterboard PCB... TOTAL cost was $US 13

Good to know. Thank you, I will keep them in mind. But not so quick... The
$200 per board included the parts and assembly. I thought I made it clear
that I meant the board production cost, not the PCB cost. You do not want
to receive a $13 PCB plus a bag of ball grid array parts for you to solder
in the kitchen oven?

Our board was the MicroBone that we preannounced on our website
http://skutek.com/ under the heading "ARM System-on-module". Please have a
peek. It is basically the embedded version of BeagleBone Black that we
want to use in our deeply embedded applications. (And yes, it will run the
ARM Oberon System, if we need so.) The point here is that the MicroBone is
not much different from the proposed FPGA Oberon board. The differences
will be minor, concerning the hole size, copper spacing, and the Bill of
Materials. The MicroBone production cost is therefore providing a
reasonable estimate. I wonder whether (and how) Magnus could make his
boards significantly cheaper than this.

Now compare $200 for the 100 board volume versus $55 for
hundreds-of-thousands. The comparison is valid because the MicroBone is
essentially the same as the BBB, sans the connectors. So it should be
cheaper, but it is not.

I hope this example will set the level of expectations concerning the
achievable low volume selling price.

Wojtek