Stueyb

This is a long shot but hey you never know. I'm looking for a guide to costing out an PCB, so any experts here?

I need to cost a custom hardware solution. It is basically a small computer/intelligent data logger on a board for a learning type toy for children with special needs. It needs to log and evaluate responses they make for later processing over the network (data aquired is fed back to server via ethernet, and new data sets/programs downloaded from server to toy) It also needs to be able to turn on a control circuit (AC) to make the toy move at programmed times (via a seperate control circuit that deals with it). It would also be useful if the system could make its own decision based on the data when to turn the toy on.

I need to get a very low power system (ie 20MHz is overkill) onto a small 5cm square board with the following features on a CMOS EEPROM based system with

Low spec/low power CPU
RTC onboard
1 MB RAM (Actual program is going to be very small in size, but data logging will take the rest)
Bare bones ROM Based OS - tcp/ip stack, data logging. Not even sure if an OS is required, but just needs to be able to talk tcp/ip, store and squirt results up to server and download new data sets)
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Integrated ethernet (again overkill, 10 Kbits/s is overkill but has to conform to RJ45/ethernet standard)
Needs to draw its power from 240V AC mains. Any full wave rectifier etc needs to fit on the board.

I need to get all this into a package/board size of max 5cm sqaure with everything on the board.

I'm aware that there are solutions such as Wind River VxWorks but our price point needs to be super low. Again there are others but the price of $1500 per board is way way out of our price range. If such a system on a chip already exists, can someone point me in the right direction.

The other way is possibly to create a custom ASIC. But I suspect this would be very expensive initally. The ideal price point is £5-7 per board in large volumes

TopBanana

I suggest you give these guys a call:
BitBox Ltd - About Us

That's exactly the sort of work they do.