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Forum: General Discussions Topic: In Memoriam - Marcel van Kervinck |
| monsonite |
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Posted: Wed May 27, 2020 10:11 am
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Replies: 2
Views: 341
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| It is with deepest regrets that I announce the death on Tuesday 25th May of Marcel van Kervinck - the creator of the Gigatron TTL Computer. Marcel passed peacefully following a long illness and to regular readers of the Gigatron forum, it was clear that in recent weeks he had increasing health probl... |
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Forum: CPU/MCU choices and designs Topic: Suite-16 (formerly Bitslice using currently available TTL) |
| monsonite |
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Posted: Fri Jan 17, 2020 8:39 pm
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Replies: 47
Views: 10987
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| Hi All - and Happy New Year - although we are already more than half way through January. This post is by way of an update, because I realise that the Suite-16 project has been fairly quiet since early November. In mid-November I went over to California for a couple of weeks - firstly to attend Fort... |
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Forum: General Discussions Topic: New transistor design could revolutionise digital, analogue |
| monsonite |
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Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2019 2:24 pm
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Replies: 2
Views: 1496
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| Ed, There are also patents (pending) for their Instantaneous Processor Unit (IPU) which sounds like it can process analogue signals without the complexity of ADC then digital processing then DAC. The sort of application might include a LED lighting controller, power factor controller for switched mo... |
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Forum: General Discussions Topic: New transistor design could revolutionise digital, analogue |
| monsonite |
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Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2019 12:52 pm
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Replies: 2
Views: 1496
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| Hi All, It's not everyday that you read about a fundamental new kind of transistor that could revolutionise the way we produce ICs. Whilst Intel and their competitors are chasing 7nm technology with multi-billion investments in fabs and design teams, this new device is aiming to have appeal for the ... |
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Forum: CPU/MCU choices and designs Topic: Suite-16 (formerly Bitslice using currently available TTL) |
| monsonite |
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Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2019 11:01 am
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Replies: 47
Views: 10987
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| Yes, Two minds clearly better than one! And Frank's TASM contribution has come at just the right stage in the project. After about 2 weeks since Hello World!" - I think that I have probably hand-assembled enough code to prove what can be done, and also highlight any deficiencies in the instruct... |
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Forum: CPU/MCU choices and designs Topic: Suite-16 (formerly Bitslice using currently available TTL) |
| monsonite |
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Posted: Sat Nov 02, 2019 10:52 pm
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Replies: 47
Views: 10987
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| This week there has not been so much obvious progress with Suite-16 - but I have been tying up a few loose ends. It became obvious from my early coding ventures that the instruction set was lacking the means to handle 8-bit values, without going through some rather clumsy register operations. To rem... |
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Forum: CPU/MCU choices and designs Topic: Suite-16 (formerly Bitslice using currently available TTL) |
| monsonite |
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Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2019 1:26 pm
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Replies: 47
Views: 10987
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| Previously I had been simulating the Suite-16 cpu on an MSP430 Launchpad board with FRAM. I noted that despite it being a 16-bit processor, the performance was not so good, so I have swapped over to a Nucleo STM32H743 board which has a 400MHz ARM processor. I'm still using the Arduino IDE to develop... |
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Forum: CPU/MCU choices and designs Topic: Suite-16 (formerly Bitslice using currently available TTL) |
| monsonite |
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Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2019 8:24 am
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Replies: 47
Views: 10987
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| Ed, I did have some reservations about entering the dark lair of "self modifying code". When I looked at EDSAC simulation a couple of years back, it was the first lesson you learned - in order to get anything useful done. I now need to look at the new instructions and just make sure I can ... |
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Forum: CPU/MCU choices and designs Topic: Suite-16 (formerly Bitslice using currently available TTL) |
| monsonite |
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Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2019 7:53 am
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Replies: 47
Views: 10987
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| Hi Ed, It did actually involve quite a few instructions, (half a dozen actually), because of current limitations in the instruction set. Suite-16 is currently only using an 8-bit jump address which is stored in the payload section of the instruction. If we extend this to a 16-bit jump, the target ad... |
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Forum: CPU/MCU choices and designs Topic: Suite-16 (formerly Bitslice using currently available TTL) |
| monsonite |
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Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2019 11:01 pm
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Replies: 47
Views: 10987
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| Today I have been focusing on the overall structure for my SIMPL interpreter, and got most of the plumbing in place so that it will actually do useful stuff. SIMPL is Serial Interpreted Minimal Programming Language - it's a tiny reverse polish, extensible forth-like language that uses single ascii c... |
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Forum: Projects Topic: 74xx based CPU (yet another) |
| monsonite |
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Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2019 10:34 pm
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Replies: 223
Views: 65351
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| Hi Joan, This is great progress - congratulations, and I am honoured that my "work" has been a source of inspiration to you. I learned fairly early on that the first things to get working on an unfamiliar system (after the Hello World or blinkenled) are putchar and getchar closely followed... |
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Forum: CPU/MCU choices and designs Topic: Suite-16 (formerly Bitslice using currently available TTL) |
| monsonite |
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Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2019 8:44 am
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Replies: 47
Views: 10987
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| Joan, Interesting thought, but I did do some fairly aggressive optimisation. Because I have plenty of registers, once I have loaded the various constants into them, there is very little need to involve memory. I counted the MSP430 instructions as 16, but this translates to 25 words, as not all instr... |
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Forum: CPU/MCU choices and designs Topic: Suite-16 (formerly Bitslice using currently available TTL) |
| monsonite |
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Posted: Thu Oct 24, 2019 4:28 pm
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Replies: 47
Views: 10987
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| I'm starting to make some good progress with Suite-16 coding, and enjoying the challenge of every new routine. Since I got the CALL and Return instructions working yesterday I have been able to rewrite my decimal number print routine using a much cleaner subroutine approach. I wasn't happy about my ... |
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Forum: CPU/MCU choices and designs Topic: Suite-16 (formerly Bitslice using currently available TTL) |
| monsonite |
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Posted: Wed Oct 23, 2019 11:24 am
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Replies: 47
Views: 10987
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| Hi Joan, I learnt a lot from Marcel's Gigatron project. This was a good introduction to TTL computers. Marcel taught me the value of using the Arduino as a development tool - but also as a programmable interface device to handle things like PS/2 and software loading. I'm not currently planning any i... |
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Forum: CPU/MCU choices and designs Topic: Suite-16 (formerly Bitslice using currently available TTL) |
| monsonite |
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Posted: Wed Oct 23, 2019 7:42 am
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Replies: 47
Views: 10987
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| Joan, Good question - In the simplest of microprocessor systems you would frequently use a UART IC - such as the 68B50. However this device contains a multiple registers and would not be easy to program with such a simple I/O scheme as I am planning. Implementing a UART in TTL, whilst obviously poss... |
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