Fabrication of Printed Circuit Boards ("PCBs") is not very economical as the cost of fabrication raises (among others) with size and the amount of layers and addition to thatd often requires:
1. To sign an NDA
2. Restriction on release of important documents (documentation, reference schematics and gerbers).
3. Restriction on releasing the finished product sources if it's using proprietary components
Which is a limiting factor for Open-Source Hardware (OSHW) development that I want to address.
## Idea
The inspiration comes from OLIMEX's SODIMM-204 project which is a solution of two PCBs:
**Module Board**
Board with 4~12+ layers of restricted size that includes the chip, RAM and optionally chip-specific components such as the [OLIMEX A20-SOM204](https://www.olimex.com/Products/SOM204/A20/A20-SOM204):
Board with SODIMM-204 connector that the Module Board slots in such as the [OLIMEX A20-SOM204-EVB](https://www.olimex.com/Products/SOM204/A20-SOM204-EVB) which then adds various devices (Ethernet, PCIe, GPIO, Battery, HDMI, etc..)
that can then be used to design anything from drones, tablets, cluster servers, etc.. on a platform board PCB that is 1~4 layers and costs around 25 EUR to fabricate.
This effectically allows us to make variety of OSHW projects very economically that use hardware comparable to those in raspberry pi and beyond which integrates on difficulty of changing the RAM in a common notebook.
### Use of proprietary module boards
Additionally many chips are near impossible to get as OSHW-compatible due to consumer-hostile business plan and strategy until the chip reaches it's peak economical cycle and becomes obsolete.
To allow us to use better hardware this would allow the module boards to be produced in batches of 1000+ to keep the cost down while not affecting the hackability and flexibility of the OSHW project as the user can always use OSHW Module Board and only have the option to use proprietary module board until it's manufacturer decides to release the required documents (documentation for the chips, reference schematics/design, etc..)
## Issue
204 pins is not enough which eventually lead to OLIMEX using non-standardized headers per chip that break portability such as the [OLIMEX A20-SOM-EVB](https://www.olimex.com/Products/SOM/A20/A20-SOM-EVB/open-source-hardware) Using 240 pins.
The obvious solution would be to use DDR5 SODIMM which has 262pins, but that still feels like using the wrong tool for the job -> Is there a better connecting solution for this usecase?
## Possible solutions
### Use of Edge Connectors on Single Board Computers ("SBCs") boards
Lets imagine that we have [OLIMEX OlinuXino-A64](https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A64/A64-OLinuXino/open-source-hardware) board as an example:
For clarity edge connector are contact points on the edge of PCBs designed to slot into a connector, often used on PCIe x16 graphics cards used for desktop computers:
