MSV11-J engineering info

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Glen Slick

    > There are 88 41256 256Kx1 DRAMs on a 2MB MSV11-J. Each 512KB bank has
    > 22 256Kx1 DRAMs organized as 16 data bits plus 6 ECC bits.

Umm, I think the internal organization is paired banks (one for even word
addresses, one for odd); the manual talks about doing double-word reads
(although only one word gets transferred over the bus at a time, but the
PMI has some optimization for double-word cycles, IIRC).

    > If someone was sufficiently motivated I suppose they could probe each
    > of the 88 DRAMs while writing various bit patterns of data to various
    > memory locations and work out the mapping that way. ... I'm not sure
    > which would be more work, probing one or a small number of DRAMs at a
    > time

Oh, that's an improvement on what I was thinking of as a fall-back, if nobody
has the info (which was to tie the outputs of individual DRAM chips high or
low - depending on how they implement their output stages - through a
suitably-sized resistor, and look to see what effect it had on writing and
then reading - all 0's or 1's, depending on the tie - still a lot less work
than pulling chips :-). Dunno why it wasn't obvious this would be easier! :-)

I would/will just write a two-instruction loop (in the PARs) which writes a
word with only a single '1' bit, hook up a 'scope (I'm too lazy to hook up a
logic analyzer :-) to a DRAM input, and walk the bit through the odd and even
words until I see it on the 'scope.

I thought about doing the ECC bits first, using the maintenance mode (to walk
a '1' through the ECC bits), to avoid getting confused by 1's being written to
them during the above process, but that would be a lot more work, since I'd
have to look at all the chips in the array to find the one that's getting the
'1' ECC bit.

It'll probably be a lot easier to just disable ECC, and write all 0's to all
the ECC bits while doing the data bit discovery (above); once those are done,
the remaining chips are known to be ECC, and I can walk a '1' through the ECC
bits to work them out.

    > From a brief look at the manual it might be possible to use diagnostic
    > modes to write specific ECC bit patterns and work out the ECC bit
    > mappings as well.

Yup, that was my take too. Although I'm having to re-read the manual a few
times to fully grok how all the various mode bits interact!

    > Might be very tedious, so might need lots of motivation.

I think that using the procedure above, it'll go reasonably quickly,
actually; the more bits I ID, the fewer values I'll have to try on each
succeding DRAM chip.

    > If I ever get really bored some day maybe I'd take a look and try to
    > see just how tedious it might be.

I'm going to need this info real soon (to hopefully fix a broken MSV11-J),
so I'll probably start on this later today if nobody has the info.

I'll add the info to the MSV11-J page on the CHWiki, once I have it.

	Noel