Does the motherboard of the framework 12 have a TPM Chip? And more questions

[MJ1]

@Vids_YOH

Do you think it is possible to miniaturize the board with the help of PCBway, or ask him this question?

No, very much not possible to miniaturize, imo. At least without someone skilled in the black magic of cellular RF design. And the time of those that are skilled in it, I believe is way too valuable to them to spend their time on this. Which is also the reason a 5G card is unlikely at this point in time. I edited my post to comment on the 5G part,

in case you missed it.

@MJ1

Haven’t seen any serious efforts to produce a 5G expansion card. It seems that the 5G modules which are currently available are too large and very expensive. Bare 5G chips and the supporting RF circuity might be able to fit, but RF design is often called black magic, few people know how to do it well enough to get an acceptable result. And those that know how to do it, usually charge a prohibitive amount of money for their time. Due to that, one really needs to use a 5G module, which contains the hard RF side.

@Vids_YOH

Do you have a link to the post of that community member?

@Michael_Bebjak

I have been playing with this idea for a long time too and finally decided to complete. I loved what the OpenCom guys did and decided to shrink their module and make it a bit less akward. I am pretty familiar with Quectel as we use it at work. So here’s where I’m at so far:

Just wanted to post this to see what the interest in this would be like. The modem I am using is North America bands with 150/50 Mbps so about as good as you can get in 4G/LTE at the small form factor that would fit in an expansion card. I will be making it all open source but considering ordering some to sell too so let me know what you guys think!

The picture of the board he posted looks to me to have not one millimeter of length wasted. The connectors are placed right up against the module. LTE modules are just too long. Honestly, we are lucky they even fit at all! If they were a couple millimeters wider, it wouldn’t fit inside at all.