very nice

Very nice indeed.
Any chance you're going to design 16MB sticks for maxing out AWE32 cards?

Nice project 😀

I'd be more interested in 16MB modules...

Thank you!
I never thought about designing a 16 Mb module. It shouldn't be that hard. But it will be of a different size. A little bit taller. Although I know there are some 16Mx4 IC of reasonable size. With a 2 IC per PCB, they would look very compact.
However I don't have any piece of hardware that could use 16 Mb SIMMs.

I made 4MB ones not so long ago. 16MB ones are not gonna any more difficult than 4MB ones, except locating the chips since they aren't so easy to find, or at least not in good cost anyway...

ALEKS wrote on 2020-09-29, 15:45:

Hi, […]
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Hi,

Lately I built some SIMM memories for personal use. I am using them with 80386 machines.
I know there are other newly made SIMMs. But I would just like to also share my project with you.
Unfortunately I wasn't paying attention that SIMM sockets expect 1.2 mm PCB thickness. Mine are 1.6 mm and they are stressing the SIMM sockets. Even though these PCBs work, I will have to redo these PCBs in the future.
The PCB layout is entirely hand routed on 4 layers. Top and bottom layers are signals and inner top and inner bottom are power planes.

I tested these modules with Memtest86+ and everything works as expected.
I now have enough RAM on my 386 computer. 4 of them are 16 Mb and 8 of these things have a whopping 32 Mb.

4mx9-simm-pcba1[1].jpg

4mx9-simm-pcba3[1].jpg

4mx9-simm-pcba5[1].jpg

dram-capacity1[1].jpg

Cheers,
A.

Also be careful of gold vs tin connectors as well.

I heard the gold tin thing as well,and its common knowledge based on science. However to this day no one that I have seen has ever been able to demonstrate connector corrosion even after all of these years. Despite it being in books like A+I've never seen a real world example of it. It's not just ram slots, plenty of motherboards have tin leads in their PCI connectors, yet never seen corrosion from having PCI cards with gold leads in there for years.

Huh, I'd never really thought about the possible corrosion. Just had a read through of this:
https://www.jpcfrance.eu/technical-informatio … ion-resistance/

It's mostly looking at aluminium corrosion, but has a good table of electrochemical compatibility (interesting that gold + copper isn't green, but I've never seen gold plating on PCB traces be a problem). It also gives a couple of methods of reducing galvanic corrosion, one of which is:

Avoid relatively small areas of the less noble metal (Aluminum) and large areas of the more noble metal (Stainless steel).

Substitute tin for aluminium and gold for stainless steel and I think that's what would happen with a card with tin plated contacts plugged in to a board with gold plated contact wires. The contact wire is close to a point contact on to a relatively large plane of tin.

Also, the table is with the metals in a 2% salt water solution. So maybe it becomes a problem for computers on boats. Or when there's a good electrolyte present, like when capacitors leak all over the place.

Looks like some people from a company in Singapore did a test for tin-gold corrosion in connectors and didn't find anything:
https://www.digipas.com/documents/Effects-of- … ed-Contacts.pdf
That's tin plated flat flexible cables inserted in to gold plated connectors.

I´m still wondering why the smart guys at "PC-Chips" gold-plated the retention clips of the SIMM slots while using crappy electronic components and fake caches.

majestyk wrote on 2021-04-11, 16:02:

I´m still wondering why the smart guys at "PC-Chips" gold-plated the retention clips of the SIMM slots while using crappy electronic components and fake caches.

for the 'bling' factor ! 😁