5 May
2001
5 May
'01
2:35 p.m.
Chuck, interesting you should mention the Burch kit...and
the PDP10 in the same message! I'm using my Burch-
board( a wonderful product at a great price- good work Tony!)
to debug bits and pieces of my KL-10 fpga design. So far I've
only got the 36bit alu, IR, MAR/MDR, CC muxes(the easy parts)
and am reverse engineering the rest from the KS-10 and KL-10
microcode. You can do a lot with even a 200kgate part - the XCS200
I've got Webpack software that Tony ships with the board, as well as a
student version of Foundation from a book, and WARP from
another book to develop with. Major integration and verification
will require a full Foundation or similar software for around 3KUS$.
As a nifty mini-project - it would be nice if a PDP11/40 (the KL-10
front end ) could be made to fit on a Burch board and XC2S200 part.
If you're interested in CPU soft cores for fpga - check out Jan Gray's
excellent site http://www.fpgacpu.org/ . Alphdata in Scotland has a PCI card
with
fast SSRAM and an Xilinx XRC/812E-8 perfect for a KL-10 implementation.
Neil Franklin is also working on squeezing a KA-10 into an XC2S200
(same as on the Burch- using JBits)
Regards,all
Heinz
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chuck McManis" <cmcmanis(a)mcmanis.com>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2001 3:49 PM
Subject: Re: Allison: 2910c version of z80
Heinz mentioned the Spartan FPGAs and Allison added:
design
a nice Virtex or Spartan fpga will fit a whole
processor
Check again Allison. I've been playing around with a Spartan-II 200K gate
FPGA that is on a board built by Tony Burch <http://www.burched.com.au>
(and my experiences with it are here:
<http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/robotics/fpga>). The board and some support
stuff (SRAM, Serial/Kbd/mouse ports, etc) was less than $400 and the with up to 1mbit or sram on chip.
Far more
interesting, out of my range of tools to do.
Allison tools are *free*. You do have to take the time to
learn VHDL but so far
the
payoff has been worth it for me. I'm having a
blast with this thing. My
"final" is a PDP-8 w/ Serial terminal (think DECMate in a single chip)
with
full lights and switches. This chip can do that
easily. I don't think it
can do a KL-10 but it might ...
--Chuck