NUC980 Hardware and Software

NUC980 ARM9 board design with 2 layer PCB.

As this SoC has only 64MB DDR memory, 128MB SPI-Nand flash, rootfs must be in minimal, buildroot is a suitable for such case.

The images are quite small:

/img/NUC980_buildroot.png

The design is in 2 parts, one is the core board, which export the NUC980 Pins using DIP. Part 2 is the base board, which export some interfaces and storage for production purpose.

/img/NUC980_Core.png

/img/NUC980_Full.png

For the first version of HW, IP101 is used as the Ethernet Mac and PHY IC, but it’s not working as expected.

/img/NUC980_IP101_Sch.png

For the L2 and L3 we can simply replace them with the 0R resistors.

According to the Datasheet, RMII mode is required, so the Pin4 is pull-up

/img/NUC980_IP101_Mode.png

A 25MHz external oscillator is connected to X1 and X2

/img/NUC980_IP101_Sch.png

Use the deveice to measure the clock, we can clearly view the 50MHz clock:

/img/NUC980_IP101_50M.png

Check the clk of IC Pin:

/img/NUC980_IP101_50M_detail.png

Check the reset PIN pull-up to pull-down timing, duration should be large than 2.5ms:

/img/NUC980_IP101_Reset.png

As we have 2 PHY, the PHY address should be different for them:

/img/NUC980_IP101_PHY_Address.png

Actually the configuration pins are set to:

/img/NUC980_IP101_PHY_Address_Sch.png

The Core board is designed in 2-layer PCB, EMC/EMI is not handled carefully, After re-layout the IP101 and its peripheral components, this problem has been resolved.

/img/PHYID_Log.png

This board use the SPINand as the main storage for bootloader, kernel and rootfs, and NUC official has a GUI utility for burnning through USB.

For different SPI-Nand flash, set to different value:

/img/NUC980_BootFlashMode.png

Board can boot from USB or Flash:

/img/NUC980_BootFrom.png

Set the USB to OTG mode before burnning:

/img/NUC980_USBMode.png

Config the PG pins to set boot media:

/img/NUC980_BootCfgSch.png

Install the driver and Open the NuWriter, then start to burn:

/img/NUC980_Burnning.png