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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
18 years agoit is my DIY cheap 2 layer board trace width 0.25mm Via hole 0.4mm board cost me 38$ so it is not big money loose, and here is pictures of board with connected VCCA1 pin
https://www.alteraforum.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=319 here is picture of second PCB where I made first drilling test to see if it is possible to drill such hole and gain some drilling experience :) https://www.alteraforum.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=321 https://www.alteraforum.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=320 in 2 layers I managed to route first 2 ball rows + configuration pins for Fast Passive Parallel configuration with MAX3000 and 16Mb parallel flash, the main purpose of this board was to evaluate this new super fast +cheep (totally 5$) configuration scheme :) and in addition I have 50 IOs and I can add external voltage to 4 IO banks, by external power supply(or connect to 3.2V on board regulator), that kind of feature is not supported on any altera Dev.kit, So I have 4 individual IO banks that can by set at any voltage I need :) I choose to use BGA256 package because 144pin package had too small IO count(94), my previous cyclone II had 208 pin package (it was enough), so cyclone III I had only one choice BGA256, where for first 2 rows I can route 124IOs that is by 30IOs more than 144pack :) so 124 is reasonable IO count for connecting some high count devices, ofcourse by data sheet BGA256 pack has 182 IOs, but then I need to make 4 layer PCB which cost about 200$ it is too much for hobby staff, and to get it cheap you must make more than 100 boards and then sell them.