Hey guys,

 

Coming from high level programming such as Java or C#, I'm quite new to mid-level development. I'm working on a project and I was wondering there are any low cost Linux compatible SoC that are guaranteed to have a long term availability for like 5-7 years or more? I've seen the H3, but since it is manufactured by a chinese company, I'm not sure about the availability of this chip on long term.

 

Thanks

This is a bit of a circular discussion, SoC's for SBC's are almost always "old news", so they've been around a few years before Linux is going to work on them properly.  In order for people to support them they have to be expected to have some longevity, but again, you're looking at 3-ish years after SOP sometimes before good support.  Then the SoC has more or less service life left, and that's entirely up to the vendor.

 

As far as Chinese company goes, there are few alternatives.  I would recommend simply sticking to as standard of libraries and api's as possible to maintain portability.  

I've stumbled on this MicroChip SoM which seems promising, but the cost is a bit higher. Knowing that Microchip is very reliable, I might try there product. I'm still looking for a similar product or company that offer this kind of long term availability.

 

Thanks

1 hour ago, el_pablo said:

Knowing that Microchip is very reliable

 

Is that the same company responsible for the new RPi 3 B+ not even able to do a fallback to Fast Ethernet with older or broken network cables unlike every other GbE NIC out there?

 

'Sadly, as far as we know, the LAN7800 chip doesn't support a fallback mode to 100Mbit/s should the extra pairs not be available. There is still an open enquiry with Microchip over this. If you are missing the pairs then the link will simply not come up.'

i.MX 8 Family – Arm Cortex-A53, Cortex-A72, Virtualization, Vision, 3D Graphics, 4K Video

shouldn't this one go into the  libre phone  or whatever its name is ?

 

2 hours ago, Tido said:

i.MX 8 Family – Arm Cortex-A53, Cortex-A72, Virtualization, Vision, 3D Graphics, 4K Video

shouldn't this one go into the  libre phone  or whatever its name is ?

I'd recommend a Freescale/NXP SoC as well. As they are selling their chips to industrial clients the product longevity is substantially better compared to chips used in tablets, phones or set-top boxes, see here for more details. But product longevity has it's price ...     

Microchip is very good for long term parts availability. But I am not so sure about its acquisitions like SMSC/SST/Atmel/etc. I think I will still trust them. 

 

There are not many players in this market for Cortex A5/A7/A8/A9/Axx MPU vendors to serve long term needs like industrial electronics-- NXP/Freescale, TI, Microchip/Atmel are probably the most reputable companies.

 

FYI -- at work our product can have life cycle of more than 30 years -- in the Industrial Automation market.