I just found out about this device, and it looks perfect for a small portable design! The chip has just about everything in it, including Li charger and power supplies, available in a QFP package no less.
Has anyone else seen these chips? If so, what do you think?
Here is a link:
a) Thats not QFP, thats BGA.
b) How is your ground-up embedded Linux experience?
c) Hope you have fun routing DDR memory signals :shock:
No they actually do have a QFP version. Look closer, you will even see they mention what peripherals are not available on the QFP version VS the BGA.
As for ground up Linux, it would not be from the ground up, Linux already supports ARM-9, so all that would need to be created is BSP specific code, which Freescale already has.
As for DDR, its not really all that big of a deal. I found several papers on the internet that talk about routing DDR signals, and one even describes whats involved in doing it on a 2 layer board (that is actually kind of complex, but what do you expect, its a 2 layer board!).
Hmm, you’re right, it is available in QFP. The documentation is scattered right now :). However, this does look to be VERY intriguing, especially with all the extra parts on-chip.
I have never dealt with Freescale ARMs before (only the AT91SAM series) for embedded Linux. Any comments? OpenEmbedded builds?
I have only dealt with embedded Linux on AVR32 and Intel XSCALE, both were Buildroot based IIRC.
This chip looks really capable, but highly complex. More complex then any ARM chip I have seen, definitely more complex then the Cortex-M3 chips I have played with. Thankfully Freescale seems to have a BSP for this chip available with their eval kit. Just from the quick look I have had at the user manual for the chip, even booting this chip is complex. It does not support boot off standard parallel NOR flash, only SD/MMC, NAND, or SPI based EEPROM/NOR, and a USB ‘rescue’ mode.
Either way, I would love to get my hands on one of the eval kits for this chip and play with it for awhile. I think I might be waiting for that day for quite a bit though. 
Its Achilles heel appears to be the lack of an Ethernet MAC built in. The external chip solutions are never as elegant.
Hopefully, this will be a faster ramp up compared to the LPC17xx series 