You do need part of that - a lot of it is capacitors wired directly to the ribbon cable, for the COG's charge pump. There's also a temperature sensing chip and

You do need part of that - a lot of it is capacitors wired directly to the ribbon cable, for the COG's charge pump. There's also a temperature sensing chip and a couple of external mosfets, one of which is to fix a bug on older COGs. On my own layout I was able to shrink it quite a bit by using 0603 parts. Still expect to burn 300mm^2 on the passives. https://0x0.st/tqo.png https://0x0.st/tqo.png