PaulStoffregen
Well-known member
I suspect that PCB was designed by Intel engineers who are unfamiliar with AVR and the many quirks of Arduino.
It might also be a non-function "mock up". If you look closely at the high res photo, there's a number of strange things. The vias don't seem to have any holes. Maybe they used a filled/plugged via process? But why bother with such an expensive thing when the BGA under the Curie has only two columns that are 4 balls wide? That's easy escape routing where you wouldn't need via-in-pad. There's also a few places where traces go to nowhere, in little round voids that look like they were supposed to have a pad. By guess is they weren't done, but had a hard deadline to show something in Rome this weekend.
It might also be a non-function "mock up". If you look closely at the high res photo, there's a number of strange things. The vias don't seem to have any holes. Maybe they used a filled/plugged via process? But why bother with such an expensive thing when the BGA under the Curie has only two columns that are 4 balls wide? That's easy escape routing where you wouldn't need via-in-pad. There's also a few places where traces go to nowhere, in little round voids that look like they were supposed to have a pad. By guess is they weren't done, but had a hard deadline to show something in Rome this weekend.
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