[Solved] Help with ATSAM3X8E (Due barebones)

Graynomad:
Sorry, I meant to look at those files but forgot.

The schematic is too hard to check properly without spending ages matching pin numbers so I'll give that a miss.

Your general board layout looks good, tracks are at strange angles though but that's mostly an aesthetic thing.

I'm not that experienced with laying out high-speed traces but the USB lines are supposed to be of equal length and IIRC impedance matched to 50R. I may be wrong and I have in fact had boards work without much care taken with the D+ and D- signals using an FTDI chip. But I think that chip is just low speed USB, the SAM does high-speed as well doesn't it?

Your lengths look reasonable, but you have sharp corners and vias, all of which are bad for high speed signals.

If you look at the Due traces they are matched,all on the top layer and no vias. Like I said though I don't now how important it is.

So I'll be interested to see if the USB works, especially through all the connectors.

Also I can't find R7 and R8 on the PCB. Can you post the Eagle design file?


Rob

Your feedback is great! Didn't think about the "equal length" thingy for the USB part. I myself don't have nor use high speed USB yet. I know that it's supported by the SAM, but I believe that it will work if nothing is wrong with the full USB lines. My home brewed leonardo dosen't have equal USB length signals and it works pretty good (it's not high speed, and nothing is wrong with the USB lines). I only have three vias. Two for the high speed USB part and one for a ground connection. R7 and R8 are near the breakout-board connectors.

I made this pretty quick and it's not a final design. Just a way to move this from a breadboard to a PCB for testing. So the routing is pretty "sh*tty" i know, but look at it from the bright side, there is only a few 90 degree angled connections =P!

Here's the schematic and board file:

Schematic: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/74389175/BaselM3Proto/BaselsM3ProtoV1.0.sch
Board: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/74389175/BaselM3Proto/BaselsM3ProtoV1.0.brd

Edit: Yes, your pretty much right about the high speed USB. I found a document from Atmel stating pretty much what you told me. Here is a link to the pdf, http://www.atmel.com/Images/doc32122.pdf. Well all I have now is hope that it works.