3 Feb
2010
3 Feb
'10
10:29 a.m.
On 2/3/10, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
Z8530. 'Nuff said.
Well, not quite 'nuff...it's an AMAZINGLY nice chip! I've done
quite a bit with it (both in my designs and in existing systems) and
have always been impressed with its capabilities.
We used the Z8530 on our later COMBOARD designs for bisync and SNA
comms. I did quite a bit of low-level programming in M68K assembler
for it. Except for the fact that we had an early system design (1985)
with a 4MHz chip on an 8MHz platform and needed to be careful about
how fast we hammered the registers, it was really fun to program.
One way we leveraged it in our embedded design was to keep the primary
SIO channel in sync mode and the secondary in async mode so we could
use the secondary channel for debugging/tracing.
If I needed more than a INS6402/RCA1854 or a 6850 could do in a new
hobby design, I'd happily reach for a Z8530.
-ethan