Introduction to the OSD335x Reference Design Tutorial Series

Published On: June, 29, 2017 By: Eshtaartha Basu | Updated: July 18, 2018 by Cathleen Wicks

The OSD335x family of System-In-Package (SiP) devices serve as a solid foundation to build advanced embedded systems quickly with reduced time to market. These SiPs tightly integrate Texas Instrument (TI)’s AM335x ARM® Cortex® A8 CPU, TPS65217C Power Management IC (PMIC), TL5209 LDO, up to 1GB of DDR3 and all associated passives. All this is contained in a US quarter sized package as shown in Figure 1.

At Octavo Systems, we are committed to simplifying your design as much as possible so that you can quickly start designing and building your dream products. With this intent in mind, we have developed the OSD335x Reference Design Tutorial Series which will walk you through the OSD335x design process in a systematic manner.

Figure 1 OSD335x in comparison with US quarter

The tutorial series is broken down into several lessons. Each lesson will address specific concepts and build upon the concepts of previous lessons. Each lesson will conclude with a Printed Circuit Board (PCB), which will implement and verify all of the concepts taught. The lessons will begin with the basics and then take you through advanced concepts.

Each lesson will covert:

Lesson 1: You will learn how to build the bare minimum circuitry required to boot the OSD335x without an operating system and all the concepts related to it as follows:

Lesson 2: You will learn how to build the minimum circuitry required to Boot Linux on the OSD335x and all the concepts related to it.

The complete OSD335x Design Tutorial series can be downloaded here.

Fundamentals of the OSD335x

There are many parts within the OSD335x family. We will be focusing on the OSD3358-512M-BAS in this series. Therefore, all references to the OSD335x hereafter imply OSD3358-512M-BAS.

Figure 2 OSD335x BGA package

The OSD335x comes in a 27mm x 27mm Ball Grid Array (BGA) package with 400 balls and 1.27mm ball pitch as shown in Figure 2.

OSD335 Functional Block Diagram
OSD335x Functional Block Diagram

 

It consists of four main components as shown in Figure 3. They are:

  • Sitara® AM335x ARM® Cortex® A8 processor from TI – is the heart of the OSD335x
  • TPS65217C Power Management IC (PMIC) from TI – manages power distribution to various parts of the OSD335x and provides power to external devices
  • TL5209 Low Drop Out (LDO) regulator from TI– provides dedicated 3.3V rail to power external components of the OSD335x
  • Up to 1GB of DDR3 – is the main memory of the OSD335x.

All of the peripheral interfaces of the AM335x (except the DDR interface) are brought out to pins on the OSD335x. See the OSD335x datasheet for more information on the pinout.

Lesson organization

Each lesson will consist of an Introduction section which describes the objective of the lesson followed by a series of articles, each of which will walk you through the design methodology. The lesson will conclude with an Expected outcome section which describes how the outcome of that lesson will look.

Furthermore, each lesson may have several Perks and Caveats. The Perks will give additional information about the topic in discussion and the Caveats will warn you about conditions or situations which require more attention. The Perks and Caveats look like this:

Perk
Perks will give you additional information about the topic in discussion.
Caveat
Caveats will warn you about conditions or situations which require more attention.

Before starting lesson 1, we strongly encourage you to go through the OSD335x datasheet which can be found here.

Pre-requisites

We will be using Autodesk Eagle for schematics and layout. Hence, we assume that you are familiar with Eagle schematics and layout. If not, please learn about them first. The following website is one of the many websites that can help you:

To learn more about schematics: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/using-eagle-schematic

To learn more about layouts: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/using-eagle-board-layout

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