MITS 2SIO serial chip?

From: Peter C. Wallace <pcw_at_mesanet.com>
Date: Mon Dec 17 11:27:03 2001

On Sun, 16 Dec 2001, Ben Franchuk wrote:

> ajp166 wrote:
> >
> > A newer chip that can still be found is the WD37C65
> > that will do 125ns easily. Or you could easily find a d765
> > off an old board or NOS from JDR.
>
> The floppy disk chips have arrived in the post friday. I hope to get
> a chance to pick them monday.I will keep the WD37C65 in mind but
> "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.". I have added wait
> states internally for I/O.
>
> > Allison
>
> > I've built enough to enjoy later parts as I'm old enough to want
> > it done in a lifetime and the older parts meant tons more support
> > parts and the requisite connections. Of the latter, the fewer the
> > better for both buildability and reliability.
>
> Well I managed to stick my serial uart in the FPGA. One good feature
> of 'dumb' hardware is that they can be used for bootstrapping the cpu.
> (Mind you you still need a rather big prom to boot the FPGA but that
> is another story)


I guess you are not using Xilinx, but one thing I've noticed lately is the
appearance of large, serial flash EEPROMs. We are using one on them in a
new Xilinx design. The SST part is a 1 Mb chip (128KBytes) 8 pin SOP
package = $1.35. So instead of Xilinx's $4.40 OTP chip we use a 8 pin PIC
and the serial EEPROM for a total of $2.29 and get re-programmability...

> --
> Ben Franchuk --- Pre-historic Cpu's --
> www.jetnet.ab.ca/users/bfranchuk/index.html
>

Peter Wallace
Mesa Electronics
Received on Mon Dec 17 2001 - 11:27:03 GMT