HPC Microcontroller Development System–Front Panel

The final piece of the system to look at is the front panel. Here is the front of it where you can see the reset switch, a switch to control the EPROM programmer voltage and the ZIF socket for the EPROM programmer.

On the back there is a small PCB that connects to the two switches. Most of the circuitry on here appears to be to generate the EPROM programmer voltages. Below that PCB is the connector for the ZIF socket. The interesting part of this is that the whole front panel is actually a PCB itself. You can see where the ZIF socket is soldered in and the traces that lead to the connector.

HPC Microcontroller Development System–Pod2

This is the second board in the pod called the SUMMIT-POD2 board. The blue connectors connect to the buffer board and the part on the right connects to the processor socket on the target system. I will talk about that a bit more below. The board is composed of some standard TTL logic chips, a couple PALs and two large PLCC packaged chips. The U10 socket was empty on the board when I got the system. The top chip is an HPC46003V20, which is the processor that this system emulates. It’s not uncommon in an in-circuit emulator to have the processor being emulated in the interface pod where it can be physically close to the circuit that is using the processor.The second larger chip is labeled SCX6B48AHF. I believe this is a custom gate array chip designed just for this system. I assume this chip provides the interface between the development system and the processor being emulated.

Here is the back of the board. On the right you can see how the pod plugs into the socket on the system under test where the processor would go.

Here is a closeup of the ribbon cable that connects the two boards. The cable is actually manufactured into the PCB. The ribbon is sandwiched into the inner layers of the PCB. This makes the connection between the boards flexible so the pod can easily be connected to the processor socket.