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Datasheets of various chips will tell how much a pin can be loaded and how big is the maximum power dissipation of the entire device.
Translation chips are not gonna be more expensive than current limit resistors, it takes far more time to lay down all those resistors than the 3 conversion chips and time is money (though if there's machines doing the laying of parts the savings in time are not gonna be very significant).
I thought the problem here is how to route all the traces (wich are not so much), put a resistor in series on each line is far more simple in this case.Quote:
Originally Posted by TmEE
The most useful ones are pretty much 1:1 passthroughs, a row of pins matching what happens on other end, one could even see them as really wide/tall resistors as far as functionality is concerned. The few power pins in the middle aren't going to be any sort of headache.
You'd think so, but everybody wants to skimp out the very least cent from the board (which is also why I'm not convinced that "memory is cheap" when people go that far). It's also a stupid way to optimize it since most of the cost of a cartridge goes in assembling (the runs are small enough that it's cheaper to hire people than to use machines and you can't go too low there) and there's the box, manual, organizing to ship them...Quote:
Originally Posted by majinga
Also for what's worth it, when I decided to look about this topic separately I found out that the vast majority of people did indeed suggest resistors (although the exact circuits and values changed wildly each time, nobody seemed to agree on anything there) and to consider level shifters a last resort "if you don't feel safe" (sigh). I wonder how much does that skew views.