Saturday, October 24, 2020

HPC Microcontroller Development System–Personality Board

The next board we are going to look at is the Personality Board. Unlike the Brain Board which is common to all version of the development system, there is a different Personality Board for each processor.

The databook lists the following details for this board:

“The Personality Board consists of a firmware Monitor, 16k bytes of shared memory,
2k x 48 Trace memory, Port recreation logic to recapture the pins used for emulation, emulation hardware, and an In System Emulator, ISE, cable.

Up to eight external events as well as 16-bit address and 16-bit data busses can be traced in the 2k deep trace memory.”




A,B – MCM2018AN45 – 2048 x 8 static RAM

C – AM27512 – 64K x 8 EPROM

D – Brain board connectors

E – This 40 pin socket seems to have been intentionally left empty. Not sure what purpose it served.

F – This is where the buffer board plugs in which connects to the interface pod.

G – (4) MCM2018AN45 – 2048 x 8 static RAM

H - TC55464 – 64K x 4 static RAM

I – (3) MCM2018AN45 – 2048 x 8 static RAM

J – (2) 71256 – 32K x 8 static RAM

K – Power connector


On the back of the board you will see a bunch of wire-wrap wires. These are manufacturing modifications to the board. When design problems were found with boards it wasn’t always economical to create a new PCB so it was quite common for modifications like this to be done during the manufacturing process. Most of these wires connect back to a EP8201 delay line IC that was added to the board. A delay line has one input and multiple outputs the delay the signal be specific amounts of time. Based on this they probably found a timing issue with parts of the circuit so had to make the modification to alter the timing.