At 04:39 PM 8/26/99 -0600, Clint wrote: I bought something called the "Xilinx Student Edition 1.5" from Amazon.com its a book/CD combination that includes the complete suite of Xilinx Foundation tools. The book consists of a series of tutorials that last of which is building an 8 bit microprocessor. This assumes the XC4005 part which is a "5K equivalent gates' part. The software will also program a XC4010 which is a "10K equivalent gates" part. The XC4005 and XC4010 from Digi-key are (for the slower parts) $26 and $62 dollars respectively. A PDP-11 is certainly doable in the 4010 part, but I don't know if I could do it and the 11/70 MMU or if I'd end up using two parts. These parts are "slow" (50Mhz) which is a hell of a lot faster than a lot of -11's :-) There are online versions of ISA interfaces done in Verilog or VHDL. Doing a Q-bus interface should be pretty straight forward. The specs are in the architecture manual. Intel sued several people over the alleged use of Pentium microcode, legally gates would probably be safer, also microcode == memory and memory eats gates rapidly (even though the Xilinx have some cool features to avoid that) Well, once a validated VHDL description of a PDP-11 core is produced, having that made into an ASIC is fairly straight forward. Even some universities can do small runs (a couple of wafers). If was truely zero royalties we might get one of the fab houses to consider putting it on their "standard custom" list. These guys will "fill out" wafers with other parts to maximize silicon utilization. Sounds like the definition of a hobby to me. :-) I'm going to do a PDP-8 on my evaluation board, and after that will look at helping out on a PDP-11. --Chuck

Chuck wrote: I'd think it's entirely possible that someone has done this already. Certainly it's a semester-sized project for a university student. Is there a newsgroup or mailing list that might be able to point the way? - John