diff --git a/docs/ARCHITECTURE_ANALYSIS.md b/docs/ARCHITECTURE_ANALYSIS.md
index ba6f28d..0c5a75c 100644
--- a/docs/ARCHITECTURE_ANALYSIS.md
+++ b/docs/ARCHITECTURE_ANALYSIS.md
@@ -547,6 +547,72 @@ will tell us whether flat scaling is "good enough" up to some N, making
 this restructuring unnecessary, or whether the real congestion at N=8/16
 justifies it.
 
+#### 5.6.1 [EXPLORATORY] Opportunistic BRAM cache for activation tiles
+
+Smaller and more incremental than §5.6's systolic restructuring — doesn't
+require knowing anything about the target network's structure in advance.
+Artix-7 100T's Block RAM is real and currently **0% utilized** (§3, every
+real P&R signoff to date) — real, free, unused capacity.
+
+**The idea**: a small direct-mapped or low-associativity cache, in BRAM,
+remembering the last few activation tiles fetched from DDR3 (address +
+data). Before `act_tile_fetch.v` (or `ddr_prefetch_mgr.v`, EXP-0083) issues
+a real DDR3 request, check the cache first — on a hit (e.g. two jobs, on
+the same or different slots, requesting overlapping/adjacent tiles, common
+in convolution with sliding-window overlap), skip the DDR3 round-trip
+entirely.
+
+**Why it's attractive**: catches real reuse the design doesn't have to
+predict or assume in advance — unlike §5.6's systolic chains (which commit
+to a specific reuse *pattern*, weight-stationary), a cache opportunistically
+exploits WHATEVER locality the real workload happens to have, including
+patterns nobody designed for. Composable with everything else already
+built or decided (§5.1 packing, §5.4 widening, §5.6 systolic groups if that
+direction is taken) — it's a cache in front of the existing fetch path, not
+a replacement for it.
+
+**Real open questions**: cache size vs. real hit rate is workload-dependent
+and NOT measured — would need a real trace-driven estimate (or a real
+simulation with representative test data) before sizing it, not guessed.
+Coherency is simple here (activation data in DDR3 is written once by the
+host before a job runs and never modified during compute, per the current
+protocol) — no cache-invalidation problem to solve, a real simplification
+versus a general-purpose cache design.
+
+#### 5.6.2 [EXPLORATORY] Host-side (ESP32) job-queue optimization — a "software DDRManager"
+
+A different kind of lever than anything else in this section: instead of
+adding hardware intelligence inside the FPGA, exploit the fact that the
+**ESP32 already has full visibility of the whole job queue before
+submitting it** — `neural_director_packed.v`'s own `QUEUE_DEPTH=8` hardware
+queue only sees jobs one at a time as they're written over SPI; the ESP32
+firmware, upstream of that, could see and reorder ALL pending jobs at once.
+
+**The idea**: the ESP32's own job-submission firmware groups/reorders jobs
+before writing them over the management SPI bus (§2.2 of
+`docs/PHYSICAL_REALIZATION.md`), so that jobs whose DDR3 addresses are
+close together (same or adjacent rows) are submitted close together in
+time — directly reducing the real row-switch cost (§3.3) that dominates
+per-tile latency, WITHOUT any new RTL at all. A real, software-only
+"DDRManager" living in ESP32 firmware, upstream of and complementary to
+`ddr_prefetch_mgr.v` (EXP-0083, which only looks ahead within one already-
+submitted job).
+
+**Why this is worth capturing seriously, not just as a curiosity**: it's
+the cheapest possible lever in this whole list — zero RTL, zero real P&R
+risk, zero timing-margin cost (the project's real margin is thin, §2, and
+every RTL addition risks it; this doesn't touch RTL at all) — and it's far
+faster to iterate on than Verilog (the user's own established preference
+for where complexity is easiest to absorb). It doesn't compete with any
+other idea in this section — it can be built independently, at any time,
+by whoever writes the ESP32-side firmware, and composes with all of them.
+
+**Real open question**: requires the host firmware to know DDR3 addresses
+well enough to group by row locality (`ROW_BITS`/`COL_BITS`/`BANK_BITS`
+convention, §2 of `docs/PHYSICAL_REALIZATION.md`) — a real firmware-side
+design task, not yet scoped, and out of this repository's own RTL scope
+(ESP32 firmware isn't part of `hardware/v3/`).
+
 ---
 
 ## 6. Summary table: what's real vs. what's a calculation