I am looking for SOCs with integrated memory to avoid having to worry about design of a memory bus for, what is supposed to be, a pretty low power application. I'm looking for something like the raspberry pi where the ARM core and the memory are integrated into a single chip, but my searches have yielded nothing. In fact, when I look up the SAMSUNG K4P4G324EB processor that the RPi actually uses, all I get on Samsung's website is a big set of applications processors with off chip memory.
Does anyone have any resources or locations I can go to get a decent ARM SOC with around 512MB of integrated memory?
Best Answer
Some FAE explained this to me a few years back like this:
The process for fabricating DDR memory is a completely different one than the one used for the processing unit. Also, the average life time for a DDR2 IC or DDR3 IC or whatever DDR IC is much shorter (~ 3-5 years) than the availability for the processor (10-15 years). So even if they build this package-on-package IC they couldn't guarantee the lifetime, thus reducing their marketing point.
I know what you mean, laying out the DDR2/DDR3 interface is an error-prone task and requires some very low level software digging - I personally do not like that as well.