Dear Steve,

I didn’t realize how you were using what I thought was a reset circuit… I 
though you wanted to bring QUAD up in a preset bank…

Those kinds of chips work great to hold the CPU in a reset state until the rest 
of the system is ready. I guess if the QUAD/RAM were not needed for the delay 
time, it would be fine.. The ALE solution is pretty elegant. 

I actually thought the BAV diode was being used as an OR gate… oops! I’m just 
full of bad guesses!

-atsushi


On Nov 5, 2017, at 12:21 PM, Stephen Adolph <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hey that is a pretty neat part. Thanks!
> 
> 
> Characteristic is something to check out though-
> 
> "Active-low output.  RESET remains low while VCC is below the reset 
> threshold,and for 240 ms after VCC rises above the reset threshold."
> 
> In this case we want RAM to be available pretty quickly after power up, and 
> pretty quickly protected when it goes away.  I have my circuit driven by ALE 
> pulses.  It takes 13 pulses or so (about 4 CPU instructions) on power up to 
> enable the RAM, and about 3 msec to disable the RAM on power down.
> 
> I'd have to check if on power up RAM is needed withing 240 msec of a detected 
> power on.  
> 
> the beauty of using ALE is that ALE remains low during power off, and it 
> really directly indicates activity.
> 
> cheers
> Steve
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Nov 5, 2017 at 12:08 PM, Stephen Adolph <[email protected]> wrote:
> thanks for the tip!  I will check it out.
> 
> In the M100, RAMRST is meant to protect the ram.  However, in QUAD one has to 
> back drive RAMRST to essentially put the internal memory on hold.
> 
> On Sun, Nov 5, 2017 at 12:06 PM, Atsushi Takahashi <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> Dear Steve,
> 
> I ordered the old QUAD boards from OSH Park but I also purchased one of these 
> LM810M3-4.63/NOPBCT-ND
> 
> from Digi-Key in an attempt to address the power on reset issue. It’s just a 
> three pin surface mount chip. I used to have something like that in my 68hc11 
> boards… Do you think they would help you? It probably takes up less space 
> than a cap, resistor and MOSFET...
> 
> 
> I haven’t gotten around to building the QUAD yet so I cannot testify to say 
> if the reset circuit helped...
> 
> -atsushi
> 
> 
> 
> Begin forwarded message:
> 
>> From: Stephen Adolph <[email protected]>
>> Subject: [M100] QUAD update.
>> Date: November 5, 2017 at 9:36:44 AM EST
>> To: Model 100 Discussion <[email protected]>
>> Reply-To: [email protected]
>> 
>> Letting the list know that I have found a couple of defects with QUAD V4 
>> which I did 2 years ago.  Here's the defects I found.
>> 
>> 1)  I did not protect the bank switching function adequately.  The M100 OS 
>> will periodically write to ports 80h, 82h and 83h wrt the DVI.  This can 
>> cause V4 QUAD to change banks.
>> 
>> 2)  The power up/power down behaviour wasn't adequately protected, and there 
>> was a chance that RAM could be corrupted and/or banks switched on power 
>> transients.
>> 
>> 3) I was using the wrong timing to provision banks.
>> 
>> Not too good.  In fact I believe this is the source of the frustrations I 
>> was having integrating QUAD with REX Manager.
>> 
>> 
>> The good news is that I have prototyped a QUAD V5 which addresses these 
>> defects.   The changes:
>> * I have added a MOSFET based "activity switch" that allows RAM and bank 
>> switch protection on power transients
>> * I have improved the bank selection circuitry to be robust on power 
>> transients.
>> * I have changed the bank switching commands to make the mechanism more 
>> robust.
>> * bank switch state is now preserved during power transients.
>> 
>> I'll report back on how well these changes work out when I get boards back 
>> and have them tested.
>> 
>> In the meantime, I've taken QUAD V4 off of OSHPARK.
>> 
>> cheers
>> Steve
>> 
> 
> 
> 

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