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Re: [N8VEM-S100:7272] Digest for n8vem...@googlegroups.com - 16 updates in 4 topics



The ECB Z180 Mark IV board was done with 4 layers.  PCBCart was the board manufacturer; Kicad was the CAD s/w with freerouting.net.  It has been through 2 production runs.  They did excellent layer alignment.

I am currently working on an MC68030 board with DRAM (72-pin SIMMs) which will be 4 layers.  'freerouting' used with Netbeans 8.0.2 is routing the Kicad design files.  No vendor selected yet.

--John




On 06/19/2015 05:50 PM, n8vem...@googlegroups.com wrote:
Bob Bell <bb...@gmail.com>: Jun 19 04:13AM -0700

I am working on a board design (details to appear later - it's getting
close) and I am concerned about component density and the ability to route
the board. A previous version of the board pretty much maxed out component
count and took several weeks (albeit rare spare time) to hand route (the
autorouter I was using at the time just utterly gave up.) This new design,
even with all the random logic and some of the higher-level logic crammed
into *12 GALs*, exceeds the pin count, my measure of board density, of the
previous version by nearly 30%. So, it is looking quite likely that I'll
need to go to at least a 4-layer board to be sure it can be routed with the
chips as close to each other as I believe they will need to be.
Has anyone used KiCAD to do 4 layers?
Does the Chinese company I have seen used for many of the recent boards do
4 layers?
What precautions, tips or best practices should I be aware of?
Any input from this great group would be much appreciated!
 
Thanks!
 
Bob Bell
Todd Goodman <...@bonedaddy.net>: Jun 19 07:21AM -0400

PCBCart can do up to at least 10 layers (10 layers is the most in the
selection on the order entry.)
 
I'm pretty sure someone did a 4-layer board before. Not S-100 maybe but
ECB or SBC. Hopefully they'll speak up.
 
Todd
 
norwe...@aol.com: Jun 19 12:00PM -0400

>> selectionon the order entry.)
 
>> I'm pretty sure someone did a 4-layer board before. Not
>> S-100 maybe but ECB or SBC. Hopefully they'll speak up.
 
 
John Coffman did the Mark IV (Z180) board (ECB) in 4 layers.
 
 
Roger
"John Monahan" <mo...@vitasoft.org>: Jun 19 10:00AM -0700

Bob what is the circuit, I’m really surprised freerouter could not do a two layer board. I have done 80486 boards where literally finding spaces for the chips became the issue yet freerouter resolved in 2-3 days. The initial placement of chips is most critical. Try and avoid as much as possible the net wires crossing over each other.
 
Another trick is to let it run say 2 or three days. Save the file, and in KiCAD see what is not connected. Start again, but first link up by hand the previously unconnected wires.
 
Most companies these days will do multilayer boards including PCBCart. However > 2 layers are more than 2X more expensive.
 

 
Have not done > 2 layers
 
John
 

 

 

 
From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bob Bell
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 4:13 AM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [N8VEM-S100:7260] Has anyone done a board with more than the standard 2-sides?
 

 
I am working on a board design (details to appear later - it's getting close) and I am concerned about component density and the ability to route the board. A previous version of the board pretty much maxed out component count and took several weeks (albeit rare spare time) to hand route (the autorouter I was using at the time just utterly gave up.) This new design, even with all the random logic and some of the higher-level logic crammed into 12 GALs, exceeds the pin count, my measure of board density, of the previous version by nearly 30%. So, it is looking quite likely that I'll need to go to at least a 4-layer board to be sure it can be routed with the chips as close to each other as I believe they will need to be.
Has anyone used KiCAD to do 4 layers?
Does the Chinese company I have seen used for many of the recent boards do 4 layers?
What precautions, tips or best practices should I be aware of?
Any input from this great group would be much appreciated!
 
Thanks!
 
Bob Bell
 
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ShawnR <kry...@gmail.com>: Jun 19 01:22PM -0700

I just got s copy of the Altium Circuit maker beta. It is a free and unlimited, basicaly the same as Altium Described gner Pro with the exception that what you make is stored inthe built in cloud interface and you need an internet connection to use it.
 
Here is a link to the info page about it. I would be willing to let someone use my login until it is out of beta to test it out.
 
http://www.altium.com/circuitmaker/overview
 
I havent had a chance to mess with it much yet.
 
Shawn
ShawnR <kry...@gmail.com>: Jun 19 01:24PM -0700

Oh BTW, Altiums autorouter is the best and most powerful in the industry.
"Bob Bell" <bb...@gmail.com>: Jun 19 06:17PM -0400

It was nearly 10 years ago, John.
 
I had never heard of KiCAD and since I could not afford a commercial product, I was using the free software from one of the PCB houses at the time. But even the $5000 products I used in the 80’s and 90’s could not auto-route very well. I have designed and laid out probably well over 100 boards earlier in my career, and this board was packed tighter than any other I had ever done. It is the original version of the board I am currently re-designing. The motivation for this board design was primarily to replace my 64K dynamic RAM board as it was starting to have problems, and I had no knowledge of this awesome group of S-100 enthusiasts to help me locate a replacement. Called the MemPlus, it had (has) the following features all on one S-100 board:
 
· 8-bit IEEE-696 compliant slave
 
· Two sockets for 32K x 8 static RAM chips
 
· Optional battery-backup for the RAM
 
· Two sockets for up to 64K ROM that overlays the RAM if/when addressed
 
· Flexible ROM addressing – any size for either socket on any 256-byte start address boundary
 
· Optional wait-state generator for ROM addresses
 
· Optional 24-bit extended addressing
 
· Test Input port and test output port at FF. Input port used a set of switches. Output port displayed on LEDs or hex displays.
 
· A hardware monitor with these capabilities:
 
o Display 16 or 24-bit address bus
 
o Display Data Out bus (or test output port, switch-selectable)
 
o Display Data In bus
 
o Display the important status and control signals on the bus
 
o A Run/Stop switch to stop the CPU freezing the displays
 
o A single-step switch that can step one M1 cycle or one any cycle at a time, switch selectable
 
o A hardware breakpoint that can trigger on address only, set on switches
 
· Since the TIL311 displays are rather expensive, the board exists with the option to use LEDs instead of hex displays
 
· The breakpoint address and test data input switches can use either hex rotary switches, which are very convenient, or regular dip switches.
 
· The Run/Stop, Step Type, Step One Sycle, Breakpoint Arm and Output display switches are brought out to a convenient pod for ease of use.
 
· The display portion of the board is initially attached to the main S-100 board. In this configuration, the board is 2.7” taller than a standard board. However, it can be snapped off and mounted anywhere desired. Then two inexpensive 40 pin ribbon cables (like standard PATA disk drive cables) are used to connect the two.
 
I counted the pins for this board as a rough idea of density, and in the 77 sq. inches of real-estate there are 1925 pins. That’s 25 pins per square inch.
 
Given that there are two regulators and heat sinks, two 2032-style coin cell holders, and explanatory silk-screening all over the board, I think this is a very dense board. Hence my inquiry about a four or maybe a six layer board. The update I describe below is about 30 or 31 pins per square inch.
 

 
The version two of this board has been in “spare-time” design now since December 2014. It, too had some significant motivation. Last summer I bought a version 2 of the IDE/CF board and built it hoping to augment my 8” disks. Although it worked using the utility programs to write sectors and such, I could not get it to work through CP/M 2.2. My BIOS is a mashed-up mess of what used to be the California Computer Systems (CCS) CBIOS, which has worked very well for me up till the IDE/CF board came along. After hours of troubleshooting, I learned that it should be significantly easier to get it working in a CP/M 3 system. So, I began research on how to upgrade my system to CP/M 3. I learned a lot, and as a side-project, I built a second S-100 system for testing and development (I announced on the list that it was fully operational back a number of months ago.) One of the biggest things I learned was that CP/M 3 runs a whole lot better in its banked arrangement. But I only had 64K, and although I built a second 64K board so I had 128K, I had no memory manager, and my CPU, the CCS 2810 Z80 board, is a straight Z80, with no memory management either. So, the motivation was that I needed CP/M 3 to make using the IDE/CF board easier, and I needed more than 64K of RAM to make a go with CP/M 3, and I needed a memory manager to move up from 64K. Necessity is the mother of invention, so I set out in late December to invent an upgrade to my MemPlus board with the following goals in mind:
 
· Retain the 8-bit slave flavor. I see lots of work being done with 4M and 16M boards, all in support of 16 and 32 bit processors. This is great and I enjoy reading about the trials and the successes. However, I don’t see myself going there with my S-100 machines. (I have MS-DOS on several machines built for it, including about 15 vintage PC’s from the early to late 80’s.) Instead, I am happy with trying to do as much as I possibly can with my Z80. I would entertain the idea of moving up to, say, a Z180, but that’s a whole other story.
 
· Increase RAM beyond 64K. With 512K static chips readily available, two sockets would get me up to 1M. Plenty for any 8-bit machine. This gives me enough RAM to run CP/M 3 in banked mode, with several banks for disk buffers, etc. This RAM can be addressed linearly if desired by any bus master. Include the ability to use 32K, 128K or 512K chips.
 
· Build a memory manager to handle the RAM on the board for 8-bit bus masters that have only a 64K address space, like Z80. With this, I can make use of the RAM above 64K.
 
· Retain the battery-backed RAM option and provide an easy way to bypass it if not being used.
 
· Drop one ROM socket – the second was never used on the original board, and I don’t see much utility in it. The ROM can be 2K, 4K, 8K or 16K in size, set by a dip switch. Oh, and I got rid of all the ROM configuration jumpers. When the ROM size is set by the dip switch, it automatically configures the socket. (This method is employed for the RAM too.)
 
· The ability to address the ROM on any 256 byte boundary was extreme as were the switches and logic to implement it. I dropped that addressing in favor of a much simplified scheme that permits placement of the ROM in 16 different locations above 8000H. Locations not supported can be accommodated by re-programming the control logic (discussed later.)
 
· Improve the wait-state generator to the circuit everyone uses now to make up to 8 wait-states for the ROM. Modern static RAM is sufficiently fast and I don’t believe wait state will be needed, even with 8 and 10MHz CPUs. (Note: my CPU is only 4MHz. I may be looking for a way to test this design at 6, 8 or 10MHz.)
 
· Retain the test ports, but permit their address to be any I/O port from 00H to FFH.
 
· Retain the heart of the hardware monitor, as described above, and make the following enhancements:
 
o Add a slow-stepper mode of operation that will automatically step the computer by anywhere from about 1 cycle per second up to about 1000 cycles per second.
 
o Improve the breakpoint system so breaks can be triggered on nearly any bus cycle (memory read, I/O write, Interrupt Acknowledge, etc.), any memory address (including 24-bit addresses) and any data bus content. Also, include a means of adding “don’t care” bits, so, for example, a range of memory addresses could be selected and any of them hit would cause a break.
 
o Add front-panel-like memory operations: Examine, Examine Next, Deposit and Deposit Next.
 
· Retain the flexible display options.
 
· Retain the flexible dip switch or hex switch input options, and add the ability to use off-board switches.
 
· Expand on the control pod for the main operational switches, plus add on-board switches to mimic all functional operation, so the control pod can be optional or disconnected and all the hardware monitoring and front-panel operations can be done directly on the S-100 board.
 
· Wrap up as much of the logic as possible into GALs to save space. At this point in the design, there are 12 GALs on this board, a mix of 16V8 and 22V10. There is a GAL for nearly every function on the board, such as RAM addressing, MMU control, front-panel logic, etc.
 
I have bread-boarded about half of this now, and hope to breadboard and test the remaining in a couple of weeks. The only part of the design that I believe is outstanding right now is the power supply. You probably remember how I switched my machines over to a 5 volt buss running off a switching power supply. Thus all the 5Vregulators on my boards are bypassed. But for the sake of most others, I have to figure out the power needs of this board and determine how I’m going to do the voltage regulation. I like what several have done lately with the on-board switching regulator, and if no one has a problem, I’m probably going to copy it. I just got my v3 IDE/CF card today, so I’ll be looking into that soon.
 

 
Now that I have left the cat out of the bag on this project, I welcome any and all feedback. It is probably a good point to hear if anyone has any suggestions for additional improvement or notices that I have gone off the deep end somewhere.
 

 
I have enjoyed using KiCAD to work up the schematics. It pretty much matches the power of the old stand-alone systems I used before. The biggest gripe I have right now is that it is very cumbersome to copy blocks from one sheet to another. (This design exists on 5 custom-sized sheets that are nearly C size.) I am also wrestling with the fact that I built the whole design using local names for the nets. In systems I had used in the past, all nets were global. A net named GND on one sheet was automatically connected to any nets with the same name on any other sheets in the project. I got a tip from another group member the other day that I ought to be able to change all local net names to global with a text editor. I’ll be checking this out very soon. I will also be very interested to see how the board layout tools work. As I mentioned earlier, the system I used a lot years ago had an awful auto-router and I hand-routed most boards in less time, plus I always got it 100% routed, but not the auto-router.
 

 
I would really like to post my KiCAD schematics, but I’m unsure how. If you have stuck with me through this whole email and you got here, and you know how to post files like the KiCAD files, please reply and let me know.
 

 
Bob Bell
 

 

 

 

 
From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Monahan
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 1:00 PM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [N8VEM-S100:7262] Has anyone done a board with more than the standard 2-sides?
 

 
Bob what is the circuit, I’m really surprised freerouter could not do a two layer board. I have done 80486 boards where literally finding spaces for the chips became the issue yet freerouter resolved in 2-3 days. The initial placement of chips is most critical. Try and avoid as much as possible the net wires crossing over each other.
 
Another trick is to let it run say 2 or three days. Save the file, and in KiCAD see what is not connected. Start again, but first link up by hand the previously unconnected wires.
 
Most companies these days will do multilayer boards including PCBCart. However > 2 layers are more than 2X more expensive.
 

 
Have not done > 2 layers
 
John
 

 

 

 
From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bob Bell
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 4:13 AM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [N8VEM-S100:7260] Has anyone done a board with more than the standard 2-sides?
 

 
I am working on a board design (details to appear later - it's getting close) and I am concerned about component density and the ability to route the board. A previous version of the board pretty much maxed out component count and took several weeks (albeit rare spare time) to hand route (the autorouter I was using at the time just utterly gave up.) This new design, even with all the random logic and some of the higher-level logic crammed into 12 GALs, exceeds the pin count, my measure of board density, of the previous version by nearly 30%. So, it is looking quite likely that I'll need to go to at least a 4-layer board to be sure it can be routed with the chips as close to each other as I believe they will need to be.
Has anyone used KiCAD to do 4 layers?
Does the Chinese company I have seen used for many of the recent boards do 4 layers?
What precautions, tips or best practices should I be aware of?
Any input from this great group would be much appreciated!
 
Thanks!
 
Bob Bell
 
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Tom Lafleur <la...@lafleur.us>: Jun 19 06:37PM -0400

I don't use KiCAD, but I have use many of the China PCB shop for Four layer board prototype with excellent results. I use Altium for my CAD tools. (It's auto router is terrible)
 
~~ _/) ~~~~ _/) ~~~~ _/) ~~~~ _/) ~~
 
 
 
On Jun 19, 2015, at 6:17 PM, Bob Bell <bb...@gmail.com> wrote:
 
It was nearly 10 years ago, John.
I had never heard of KiCAD and since I could not afford a commercial product, I was using the free software from one of the PCB houses at the time. But even the $5000 products I used in the 80’s and 90’s could not auto-route very well. I have designed and laid out probably well over 100 boards earlier in my career, and this board was packed tighter than any other I had ever done. It is the original version of the board I am currently re-designing. The motivation for this board design was primarily to replace my 64K dynamic RAM board as it was starting to have problems, and I had no knowledge of this awesome group of S-100 enthusiasts to help me locate a replacement. Called the MemPlus, it had (has) the following features all on one S-100 board:
· 8-bit IEEE-696 compliant slave
· Two sockets for 32K x 8 static RAM chips
· Optional battery-backup for the RAM
· Two sockets for up to 64K ROM that overlays the RAM if/when addressed
· Flexible ROM addressing – any size for either socket on any 256-byte start address boundary
· Optional wait-state generator for ROM addresses
· Optional 24-bit extended addressing
· Test Input port and test output port at FF. Input port used a set of switches. Output port displayed on LEDs or hex displays.
· A hardware monitor with these capabilities:
o Display 16 or 24-bit address bus
o Display Data Out bus (or test output port, switch-selectable)
o Display Data In bus
o Display the important status and control signals on the bus
o A Run/Stop switch to stop the CPU freezing the displays
o A single-step switch that can step one M1 cycle or one any cycle at a time, switch selectable
o A hardware breakpoint that can trigger on address only, set on switches
· Since the TIL311 displays are rather expensive, the board exists with the option to use LEDs instead of hex displays
· The breakpoint address and test data input switches can use either hex rotary switches, which are very convenient, or regular dip switches.
· The Run/Stop, Step Type, Step One Sycle, Breakpoint Arm and Output display switches are brought out to a convenient pod for ease of use.
· The display portion of the board is initially attached to the main S-100 board. In this configuration, the board is 2.7” taller than a standard board. However, it can be snapped off and mounted anywhere desired. Then two inexpensive 40 pin ribbon cables (like standard PATA disk drive cables) are used to connect the two.
I counted the pins for this board as a rough idea of density, and in the 77 sq. inches of real-estate there are 1925 pins. That’s 25 pins per square inch.
Given that there are two regulators and heat sinks, two 2032-style coin cell holders, and explanatory silk-screening all over the board, I think this is a very dense board. Hence my inquiry about a four or maybe a six layer board. The update I describe below is about 30 or 31 pins per square inch.

The version two of this board has been in “spare-time” design now since December 2014. It, too had some significant motivation. Last summer I bought a version 2 of the IDE/CF board and built it hoping to augment my 8” disks. Although it worked using the utility programs to write sectors and such, I could not get it to work through CP/M 2.2. My BIOS is a mashed-up mess of what used to be the California Computer Systems (CCS) CBIOS, which has worked very well for me up till the IDE/CF board came along. After hours of troubleshooting, I learned that it should be significantly easier to get it working in a CP/M 3 system. So, I began research on how to upgrade my system to CP/M 3. I learned a lot, and as a side-project, I built a second S-100 system for testing and development (I announced on the list that it was fully operational back a number of months ago.) One of the biggest things I learned was that CP/M 3 runs a whole lot better in its banked arrangement. But I only had 64K, and although I built a second 64K board so I had 128K, I had no memory manager, and my CPU, the CCS 2810 Z80 board, is a straight Z80, with no memory management either. So, the motivation was that I needed CP/M 3 to make using the IDE/CF board easier, and I needed more than 64K of RAM to make a go with CP/M 3, and I needed a memory manager to move up from 64K. Necessity is the mother of invention, so I set out in late December to invent an upgrade to my MemPlus board with the following goals in mind:
· Retain the 8-bit slave flavor. I see lots of work being done with 4M and 16M boards, all in support of 16 and 32 bit processors. This is great and I enjoy reading about the trials and the successes. However, I don’t see myself going there with my S-100 machines. (I have MS-DOS on several machines built for it, including about 15 vintage PC’s from the early to late 80’s.) Instead, I am happy with trying to do as much as I possibly can with my Z80. I would entertain the idea of moving up to, say, a Z180, but that’s a whole other story.
· Increase RAM beyond 64K. With 512K static chips readily available, two sockets would get me up to 1M. Plenty for any 8-bit machine. This gives me enough RAM to run CP/M 3 in banked mode, with several banks for disk buffers, etc. This RAM can be addressed linearly if desired by any bus master. Include the ability to use 32K, 128K or 512K chips.
· Build a memory manager to handle the RAM on the board for 8-bit bus masters that have only a 64K address space, like Z80. With this, I can make use of the RAM above 64K.
· Retain the battery-backed RAM option and provide an easy way to bypass it if not being used.
· Drop one ROM socket – the second was never used on the original board, and I don’t see much utility in it. The ROM can be 2K, 4K, 8K or 16K in size, set by a dip switch. Oh, and I got rid of all the ROM configuration jumpers. When the ROM size is set by the dip switch, it automatically configures the socket. (This method is employed for the RAM too.)
· The ability to address the ROM on any 256 byte boundary was extreme as were the switches and logic to implement it. I dropped that addressing in favor of a much simplified scheme that permits placement of the ROM in 16 different locations above 8000H. Locations not supported can be accommodated by re-programming the control logic (discussed later.)
· Improve the wait-state generator to the circuit everyone uses now to make up to 8 wait-states for the ROM. Modern static RAM is sufficiently fast and I don’t believe wait state will be needed, even with 8 and 10MHz CPUs. (Note: my CPU is only 4MHz. I may be looking for a way to test this design at 6, 8 or 10MHz.)
· Retain the test ports, but permit their address to be any I/O port from 00H to FFH.
· Retain the heart of the hardware monitor, as described above, and make the following enhancements:
o Add a slow-stepper mode of operation that will automatically step the computer by anywhere from about 1 cycle per second up to about 1000 cycles per second.
o Improve the breakpoint system so breaks can be triggered on nearly any bus cycle (memory read, I/O write, Interrupt Acknowledge, etc.), any memory address (including 24-bit addresses) and any data bus content. Also, include a means of adding “don’t care” bits, so, for example, a range of memory addresses could be selected and any of them hit would cause a break.
o Add front-panel-like memory operations: Examine, Examine Next, Deposit and Deposit Next.
· Retain the flexible display options.
· Retain the flexible dip switch or hex switch input options, and add the ability to use off-board switches.
· Expand on the control pod for the main operational switches, plus add on-board switches to mimic all functional operation, so the control pod can be optional or disconnected and all the hardware monitoring and front-panel operations can be done directly on the S-100 board.
· Wrap up as much of the logic as possible into GALs to save space. At this point in the design, there are 12 GALs on this board, a mix of 16V8 and 22V10. There is a GAL for nearly every function on the board, such as RAM addressing, MMU control, front-panel logic, etc.
I have bread-boarded about half of this now, and hope to breadboard and test the remaining in a couple of weeks. The only part of the design that I believe is outstanding right now is the power supply. You probably remember how I switched my machines over to a 5 volt buss running off a switching power supply. Thus all the 5Vregulators on my boards are bypassed. But for the sake of most others, I have to figure out the power needs of this board and determine how I’m going to do the voltage regulation. I like what several have done lately with the on-board switching regulator, and if no one has a problem, I’m probably going to copy it. I just got my v3 IDE/CF card today, so I’ll be looking into that soon.

Now that I have left the cat out of the bag on this project, I welcome any and all feedback. It is probably a good point to hear if anyone has any suggestions for additional improvement or notices that I have gone off the deep end somewhere.

I have enjoyed using KiCAD to work up the schematics. It pretty much matches the power of the old stand-alone systems I used before. The biggest gripe I have right now is that it is very cumbersome to copy blocks from one sheet to another. (This design exists on 5 custom-sized sheets that are nearly C size.) I am also wrestling with the fact that I built the whole design using local names for the nets. In systems I had used in the past, all nets were global. A net named GND on one sheet was automatically connected to any nets with the same name on any other sheets in the project. I got a tip from another group member the other day that I ought to be able to change all local net names to global with a text editor. I’ll be checking this out very soon. I will also be very interested to see how the board layout tools work. As I mentioned earlier, the system I used a lot years ago had an awful auto-router and I hand-routed most boards in less time, plus I always got it 100% routed, but not the auto-router.

I would really like to post my KiCAD schematics, but I’m unsure how. If you have stuck with me through this whole email and you got here, and you know how to post files like the KiCAD files, please reply and let me know.

Bob Bell




From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Monahan
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 1:00 PM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [N8VEM-S100:7262] Has anyone done a board with more than the standard 2-sides?

Bob what is the circuit, I’m really surprised freerouter could not do a two layer board. I have done 80486 boards where literally finding spaces for the chips became the issue yet freerouter resolved in 2-3 days. The initial placement of chips is most critical. Try and avoid as much as possible the net wires crossing over each other.
Another trick is to let it run say 2 or three days. Save the file, and in KiCAD see what is not connected. Start again, but first link up by hand the previously unconnected wires.
Most companies these days will do multilayer boards including PCBCart. However > 2 layers are more than 2X more expensive.

Have not done > 2 layers
John



From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bob Bell
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 4:13 AM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [N8VEM-S100:7260] Has anyone done a board with more than the standard 2-sides?

I am working on a board design (details to appear later - it's getting close) and I am concerned about component density and the ability to route the board. A previous version of the board pretty much maxed out component count and took several weeks (albeit rare spare time) to hand route (the autorouter I was using at the time just utterly gave up.) This new design, even with all the random logic and some of the higher-level logic crammed into 12 GALs, exceeds the pin count, my measure of board density, of the previous version by nearly 30%. So, it is looking quite likely that I'll need to go to at least a 4-layer board to be sure it can be routed with the chips as close to each other as I believe they will need to be.
Has anyone used KiCAD to do 4 layers?
Does the Chinese company I have seen used for many of the recent boards do 4 layers?
What precautions, tips or best practices should I be aware of?
Any input from this great group would be much appreciated!
 
Thanks!
 
Bob Bell
 
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"Bob Bell" <bb...@gmail.com>: Jun 19 07:21PM -0400

That’s funny. Just a little while ago, someone said the Altium auto-router is the best.
 

 
Bob Bell
 

 

 
From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Tom Lafleur
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 6:37 PM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [N8VEM-S100:7268] Has anyone done a board with more than the standard 2-sides?
 

 
I don't use KiCAD, but I have use many of the China PCB shop for Four layer board prototype with excellent results. I use Altium for my CAD tools. (It's auto router is terrible)
 
~~ _/) ~~~~ _/) ~~~~ _/) ~~~~ _/) ~~
 

 

 
 
On Jun 19, 2015, at 6:17 PM, Bob Bell <bb...@gmail.com> wrote:
 
It was nearly 10 years ago, John.
 
I had never heard of KiCAD and since I could not afford a commercial product, I was using the free software from one of the PCB houses at the time. But even the $5000 products I used in the 80’s and 90’s could not auto-route very well. I have designed and laid out probably well over 100 boards earlier in my career, and this board was packed tighter than any other I had ever done. It is the original version of the board I am currently re-designing. The motivation for this board design was primarily to replace my 64K dynamic RAM board as it was starting to have problems, and I had no knowledge of this awesome group of S-100 enthusiasts to help me locate a replacement. Called the MemPlus, it had (has) the following features all on one S-100 board:
 
· 8-bit IEEE-696 compliant slave
 
· Two sockets for 32K x 8 static RAM chips
 
· Optional battery-backup for the RAM
 
· Two sockets for up to 64K ROM that overlays the RAM if/when addressed
 
· Flexible ROM addressing – any size for either socket on any 256-byte start address boundary
 
· Optional wait-state generator for ROM addresses
 
· Optional 24-bit extended addressing
 
· Test Input port and test output port at FF. Input port used a set of switches. Output port displayed on LEDs or hex displays.
 
· A hardware monitor with these capabilities:
 
o Display 16 or 24-bit address bus
 
o Display Data Out bus (or test output port, switch-selectable)
 
o Display Data In bus
 
o Display the important status and control signals on the bus
 
o A Run/Stop switch to stop the CPU freezing the displays
 
o A single-step switch that can step one M1 cycle or one any cycle at a time, switch selectable
 
o A hardware breakpoint that can trigger on address only, set on switches
 
· Since the TIL311 displays are rather expensive, the board exists with the option to use LEDs instead of hex displays
 
· The breakpoint address and test data input switches can use either hex rotary switches, which are very convenient, or regular dip switches.
 
· The Run/Stop, Step Type, Step One Sycle, Breakpoint Arm and Output display switches are brought out to a convenient pod for ease of use.
 
· The display portion of the board is initially attached to the main S-100 board. In this configuration, the board is 2.7” taller than a standard board. However, it can be snapped off and mounted anywhere desired. Then two inexpensive 40 pin ribbon cables (like standard PATA disk drive cables) are used to connect the two.
 
I counted the pins for this board as a rough idea of density, and in the 77 sq. inches of real-estate there are 1925 pins. That’s 25 pins per square inch.
 
Given that there are two regulators and heat sinks, two 2032-style coin cell holders, and explanatory silk-screening all over the board, I think this is a very dense board. Hence my inquiry about a four or maybe a six layer board. The update I describe below is about 30 or 31 pins per square inch.
 

 
The version two of this board has been in “spare-time” design now since December 2014. It, too had some significant motivation. Last summer I bought a version 2 of the IDE/CF board and built it hoping to augment my 8” disks. Although it worked using the utility programs to write sectors and such, I could not get it to work through CP/M 2.2. My BIOS is a mashed-up mess of what used to be the California Computer Systems (CCS) CBIOS, which has worked very well for me up till the IDE/CF board came along. After hours of troubleshooting, I learned that it should be significantly easier to get it working in a CP/M 3 system. So, I began research on how to upgrade my system to CP/M 3. I learned a lot, and as a side-project, I built a second S-100 system for testing and development (I announced on the list that it was fully operational back a number of months ago.) One of the biggest things I learned was that CP/M 3 runs a whole lot better in its banked arrangement. But I only had 64K, and although I built a second 64K board so I had 128K, I had no memory manager, and my CPU, the CCS 2810 Z80 board, is a straight Z80, with no memory management either. So, the motivation was that I needed CP/M 3 to make using the IDE/CF board easier, and I needed more than 64K of RAM to make a go with CP/M 3, and I needed a memory manager to move up from 64K. Necessity is the mother of invention, so I set out in late December to invent an upgrade to my MemPlus board with the following goals in mind:
 
· Retain the 8-bit slave flavor. I see lots of work being done with 4M and 16M boards, all in support of 16 and 32 bit processors. This is great and I enjoy reading about the trials and the successes. However, I don’t see myself going there with my S-100 machines. (I have MS-DOS on several machines built for it, including about 15 vintage PC’s from the early to late 80’s.) Instead, I am happy with trying to do as much as I possibly can with my Z80. I would entertain the idea of moving up to, say, a Z180, but that’s a whole other story.
 
· Increase RAM beyond 64K. With 512K static chips readily available, two sockets would get me up to 1M. Plenty for any 8-bit machine. This gives me enough RAM to run CP/M 3 in banked mode, with several banks for disk buffers, etc. This RAM can be addressed linearly if desired by any bus master. Include the ability to use 32K, 128K or 512K chips.
 
· Build a memory manager to handle the RAM on the board for 8-bit bus masters that have only a 64K address space, like Z80. With this, I can make use of the RAM above 64K.
 
· Retain the battery-backed RAM option and provide an easy way to bypass it if not being used.
 
· Drop one ROM socket – the second was never used on the original board, and I don’t see much utility in it. The ROM can be 2K, 4K, 8K or 16K in size, set by a dip switch. Oh, and I got rid of all the ROM configuration jumpers. When the ROM size is set by the dip switch, it automatically configures the socket. (This method is employed for the RAM too.)
 
· The ability to address the ROM on any 256 byte boundary was extreme as were the switches and logic to implement it. I dropped that addressing in favor of a much simplified scheme that permits placement of the ROM in 16 different locations above 8000H. Locations not supported can be accommodated by re-programming the control logic (discussed later.)
 
· Improve the wait-state generator to the circuit everyone uses now to make up to 8 wait-states for the ROM. Modern static RAM is sufficiently fast and I don’t believe wait state will be needed, even with 8 and 10MHz CPUs. (Note: my CPU is only 4MHz. I may be looking for a way to test this design at 6, 8 or 10MHz.)
 
· Retain the test ports, but permit their address to be any I/O port from 00H to FFH.
 
· Retain the heart of the hardware monitor, as described above, and make the following enhancements:
 
o Add a slow-stepper mode of operation that will automatically step the computer by anywhere from about 1 cycle per second up to about 1000 cycles per second.
 
o Improve the breakpoint system so breaks can be triggered on nearly any bus cycle (memory read, I/O write, Interrupt Acknowledge, etc.), any memory address (including 24-bit addresses) and any data bus content. Also, include a means of adding “don’t care” bits, so, for example, a range of memory addresses could be selected and any of them hit would cause a break.
 
o Add front-panel-like memory operations: Examine, Examine Next, Deposit and Deposit Next.
 
· Retain the flexible display options.
 
· Retain the flexible dip switch or hex switch input options, and add the ability to use off-board switches.
 
· Expand on the control pod for the main operational switches, plus add on-board switches to mimic all functional operation, so the control pod can be optional or disconnected and all the hardware monitoring and front-panel operations can be done directly on the S-100 board.
 
· Wrap up as much of the logic as possible into GALs to save space. At this point in the design, there are 12 GALs on this board, a mix of 16V8 and 22V10. There is a GAL for nearly every function on the board, such as RAM addressing, MMU control, front-panel logic, etc.
 
I have bread-boarded about half of this now, and hope to breadboard and test the remaining in a couple of weeks. The only part of the design that I believe is outstanding right now is the power supply. You probably remember how I switched my machines over to a 5 volt buss running off a switching power supply. Thus all the 5Vregulators on my boards are bypassed. But for the sake of most others, I have to figure out the power needs of this board and determine how I’m going to do the voltage regulation. I like what several have done lately with the on-board switching regulator, and if no one has a problem, I’m probably going to copy it. I just got my v3 IDE/CF card today, so I’ll be looking into that soon.
 

 
Now that I have left the cat out of the bag on this project, I welcome any and all feedback. It is probably a good point to hear if anyone has any suggestions for additional improvement or notices that I have gone off the deep end somewhere.
 

 
I have enjoyed using KiCAD to work up the schematics. It pretty much matches the power of the old stand-alone systems I used before. The biggest gripe I have right now is that it is very cumbersome to copy blocks from one sheet to another. (This design exists on 5 custom-sized sheets that are nearly C size.) I am also wrestling with the fact that I built the whole design using local names for the nets. In systems I had used in the past, all nets were global. A net named GND on one sheet was automatically connected to any nets with the same name on any other sheets in the project. I got a tip from another group member the other day that I ought to be able to change all local net names to global with a text editor. I’ll be checking this out very soon. I will also be very interested to see how the board layout tools work. As I mentioned earlier, the system I used a lot years ago had an awful auto-router and I hand-routed most boards in less time, plus I always got it 100% routed, but not the auto-router.
 

 
I would really like to post my KiCAD schematics, but I’m unsure how. If you have stuck with me through this whole email and you got here, and you know how to post files like the KiCAD files, please reply and let me know.
 

 
Bob Bell
 

 

 

 

 
From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Monahan
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 1:00 PM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [N8VEM-S100:7262] Has anyone done a board with more than the standard 2-sides?
 

 
Bob what is the circuit, I’m really surprised freerouter could not do a two layer board. I have done 80486 boards where literally finding spaces for the chips became the issue yet freerouter resolved in 2-3 days. The initial placement of chips is most critical. Try and avoid as much as possible the net wires crossing over each other.
 
Another trick is to let it run say 2 or three days. Save the file, and in KiCAD see what is not connected. Start again, but first link up by hand the previously unconnected wires.
 
Most companies these days will do multilayer boards including PCBCart. However > 2 layers are more than 2X more expensive.
 

 
Have not done > 2 layers
 
John
 

 

 

 
From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bob Bell
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 4:13 AM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [N8VEM-S100:7260] Has anyone done a board with more than the standard 2-sides?
 

 
I am working on a board design (details to appear later - it's getting close) and I am concerned about component density and the ability to route the board. A previous version of the board pretty much maxed out component count and took several weeks (albeit rare spare time) to hand route (the autorouter I was using at the time just utterly gave up.) This new design, even with all the random logic and some of the higher-level logic crammed into 12 GALs, exceeds the pin count, my measure of board density, of the previous version by nearly 30%. So, it is looking quite likely that I'll need to go to at least a 4-layer board to be sure it can be routed with the chips as close to each other as I believe they will need to be.
Has anyone used KiCAD to do 4 layers?
Does the Chinese company I have seen used for many of the recent boards do 4 layers?
What precautions, tips or best practices should I be aware of?
Any input from this great group would be much appreciated!
 
Thanks!
 
Bob Bell
 
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Tom Lafleur <la...@lafleur.us>: Jun 19 07:37PM -0400

It overlays traces, build paths from top to bottom and forgets the via. Their tech support recommend another router
 
~~ _/) ~~~~ _/) ~~~~ _/) ~~~~ _/) ~~
 
 
 
On Jun 19, 2015, at 7:21 PM, Bob Bell <bb...@gmail.com> wrote:
 
That’s funny. Just a little while ago, someone said the Altium auto-router is the best.

Bob Bell


From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Tom Lafleur
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 6:37 PM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [N8VEM-S100:7268] Has anyone done a board with more than the standard 2-sides?

I don't use KiCAD, but I have use many of the China PCB shop for Four layer board prototype with excellent results. I use Altium for my CAD tools. (It's auto router is terrible)
 
~~ _/) ~~~~ _/) ~~~~ _/) ~~~~ _/) ~~


 
On Jun 19, 2015, at 6:17 PM, Bob Bell <bb...@gmail.com> wrote:
 
It was nearly 10 years ago, John.
I had never heard of KiCAD and since I could not afford a commercial product, I was using the free software from one of the PCB houses at the time. But even the $5000 products I used in the 80’s and 90’s could not auto-route very well. I have designed and laid out probably well over 100 boards earlier in my career, and this board was packed tighter than any other I had ever done. It is the original version of the board I am currently re-designing. The motivation for this board design was primarily to replace my 64K dynamic RAM board as it was starting to have problems, and I had no knowledge of this awesome group of S-100 enthusiasts to help me locate a replacement. Called the MemPlus, it had (has) the following features all on one S-100 board:
· 8-bit IEEE-696 compliant slave
· Two sockets for 32K x 8 static RAM chips
· Optional battery-backup for the RAM
· Two sockets for up to 64K ROM that overlays the RAM if/when addressed
· Flexible ROM addressing – any size for either socket on any 256-byte start address boundary
· Optional wait-state generator for ROM addresses
· Optional 24-bit extended addressing
· Test Input port and test output port at FF. Input port used a set of switches. Output port displayed on LEDs or hex displays.
· A hardware monitor with these capabilities:
o Display 16 or 24-bit address bus
o Display Data Out bus (or test output port, switch-selectable)
o Display Data In bus
o Display the important status and control signals on the bus
o A Run/Stop switch to stop the CPU freezing the displays
o A single-step switch that can step one M1 cycle or one any cycle at a time, switch selectable
o A hardware breakpoint that can trigger on address only, set on switches
· Since the TIL311 displays are rather expensive, the board exists with the option to use LEDs instead of hex displays
· The breakpoint address and test data input switches can use either hex rotary switches, which are very convenient, or regular dip switches.
· The Run/Stop, Step Type, Step One Sycle, Breakpoint Arm and Output display switches are brought out to a convenient pod for ease of use.
· The display portion of the board is initially attached to the main S-100 board. In this configuration, the board is 2.7” taller than a standard board. However, it can be snapped off and mounted anywhere desired. Then two inexpensive 40 pin ribbon cables (like standard PATA disk drive cables) are used to connect the two.
I counted the pins for this board as a rough idea of density, and in the 77 sq. inches of real-estate there are 1925 pins. That’s 25 pins per square inch.
Given that there are two regulators and heat sinks, two 2032-style coin cell holders, and explanatory silk-screening all over the board, I think this is a very dense board. Hence my inquiry about a four or maybe a six layer board. The update I describe below is about 30 or 31 pins per square inch.

The version two of this board has been in “spare-time” design now since December 2014. It, too had some significant motivation. Last summer I bought a version 2 of the IDE/CF board and built it hoping to augment my 8” disks. Although it worked using the utility programs to write sectors and such, I could not get it to work through CP/M 2.2. My BIOS is a mashed-up mess of what used to be the California Computer Systems (CCS) CBIOS, which has worked very well for me up till the IDE/CF board came along. After hours of troubleshooting, I learned that it should be significantly easier to get it working in a CP/M 3 system. So, I began research on how to upgrade my system to CP/M 3. I learned a lot, and as a side-project, I built a second S-100 system for testing and development (I announced on the list that it was fully operational back a number of months ago.) One of the biggest things I learned was that CP/M 3 runs a whole lot better in its banked arrangement. But I only had 64K, and although I built a second 64K board so I had 128K, I had no memory manager, and my CPU, the CCS 2810 Z80 board, is a straight Z80, with no memory management either. So, the motivation was that I needed CP/M 3 to make using the IDE/CF board easier, and I needed more than 64K of RAM to make a go with CP/M 3, and I needed a memory manager to move up from 64K. Necessity is the mother of invention, so I set out in late December to invent an upgrade to my MemPlus board with the following goals in mind:
· Retain the 8-bit slave flavor. I see lots of work being done with 4M and 16M boards, all in support of 16 and 32 bit processors. This is great and I enjoy reading about the trials and the successes. However, I don’t see myself going there with my S-100 machines. (I have MS-DOS on several machines built for it, including about 15 vintage PC’s from the early to late 80’s.) Instead, I am happy with trying to do as much as I possibly can with my Z80. I would entertain the idea of moving up to, say, a Z180, but that’s a whole other story.
· Increase RAM beyond 64K. With 512K static chips readily available, two sockets would get me up to 1M. Plenty for any 8-bit machine. This gives me enough RAM to run CP/M 3 in banked mode, with several banks for disk buffers, etc. This RAM can be addressed linearly if desired by any bus master. Include the ability to use 32K, 128K or 512K chips.
· Build a memory manager to handle the RAM on the board for 8-bit bus masters that have only a 64K address space, like Z80. With this, I can make use of the RAM above 64K.
· Retain the battery-backed RAM option and provide an easy way to bypass it if not being used.
· Drop one ROM socket – the second was never used on the original board, and I don’t see much utility in it. The ROM can be 2K, 4K, 8K or 16K in size, set by a dip switch. Oh, and I got rid of all the ROM configuration jumpers. When the ROM size is set by the dip switch, it automatically configures the socket. (This method is employed for the RAM too.)
· The ability to address the ROM on any 256 byte boundary was extreme as were the switches and logic to implement it. I dropped that addressing in favor of a much simplified scheme that permits placement of the ROM in 16 different locations above 8000H. Locations not supported can be accommodated by re-programming the control logic (discussed later.)
· Improve the wait-state generator to the circuit everyone uses now to make up to 8 wait-states for the ROM. Modern static RAM is sufficiently fast and I don’t believe wait state will be needed, even with 8 and 10MHz CPUs. (Note: my CPU is only 4MHz. I may be looking for a way to test this design at 6, 8 or 10MHz.)
· Retain the test ports, but permit their address to be any I/O port from 00H to FFH.
· Retain the heart of the hardware monitor, as described above, and make the following enhancements:
o Add a slow-stepper mode of operation that will automatically step the computer by anywhere from about 1 cycle per second up to about 1000 cycles per second.
o Improve the breakpoint system so breaks can be triggered on nearly any bus cycle (memory read, I/O write, Interrupt Acknowledge, etc.), any memory address (including 24-bit addresses) and any data bus content. Also, include a means of adding “don’t care” bits, so, for example, a range of memory addresses could be selected and any of them hit would cause a break.
o Add front-panel-like memory operations: Examine, Examine Next, Deposit and Deposit Next.
· Retain the flexible display options.
· Retain the flexible dip switch or hex switch input options, and add the ability to use off-board switches.
· Expand on the control pod for the main operational switches, plus add on-board switches to mimic all functional operation, so the control pod can be optional or disconnected and all the hardware monitoring and front-panel operations can be done directly on the S-100 board.
· Wrap up as much of the logic as possible into GALs to save space. At this point in the design, there are 12 GALs on this board, a mix of 16V8 and 22V10. There is a GAL for nearly every function on the board, such as RAM addressing, MMU control, front-panel logic, etc.
I have bread-boarded about half of this now, and hope to breadboard and test the remaining in a couple of weeks. The only part of the design that I believe is outstanding right now is the power supply. You probably remember how I switched my machines over to a 5 volt buss running off a switching power supply. Thus all the 5Vregulators on my boards are bypassed. But for the sake of most others, I have to figure out the power needs of this board and determine how I’m going to do the voltage regulation. I like what several have done lately with the on-board switching regulator, and if no one has a problem, I’m probably going to copy it. I just got my v3 IDE/CF card today, so I’ll be looking into that soon.

Now that I have left the cat out of the bag on this project, I welcome any and all feedback. It is probably a good point to hear if anyone has any suggestions for additional improvement or notices that I have gone off the deep end somewhere.

I have enjoyed using KiCAD to work up the schematics. It pretty much matches the power of the old stand-alone systems I used before. The biggest gripe I have right now is that it is very cumbersome to copy blocks from one sheet to another. (This design exists on 5 custom-sized sheets that are nearly C size.) I am also wrestling with the fact that I built the whole design using local names for the nets. In systems I had used in the past, all nets were global. A net named GND on one sheet was automatically connected to any nets with the same name on any other sheets in the project. I got a tip from another group member the other day that I ought to be able to change all local net names to global with a text editor. I’ll be checking this out very soon. I will also be very interested to see how the board layout tools work. As I mentioned earlier, the system I used a lot years ago had an awful auto-router and I hand-routed most boards in less time, plus I always got it 100% routed, but not the auto-router.

I would really like to post my KiCAD schematics, but I’m unsure how. If you have stuck with me through this whole email and you got here, and you know how to post files like the KiCAD files, please reply and let me know.

Bob Bell




From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Monahan
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 1:00 PM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [N8VEM-S100:7262] Has anyone done a board with more than the standard 2-sides?

Bob what is the circuit, I’m really surprised freerouter could not do a two layer board. I have done 80486 boards where literally finding spaces for the chips became the issue yet freerouter resolved in 2-3 days. The initial placement of chips is most critical. Try and avoid as much as possible the net wires crossing over each other.
Another trick is to let it run say 2 or three days. Save the file, and in KiCAD see what is not connected. Start again, but first link up by hand the previously unconnected wires.
Most companies these days will do multilayer boards including PCBCart. However > 2 layers are more than 2X more expensive.

Have not done > 2 layers
John



From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bob Bell
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 4:13 AM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [N8VEM-S100:7260] Has anyone done a board with more than the standard 2-sides?

I am working on a board design (details to appear later - it's getting close) and I am concerned about component density and the ability to route the board. A previous version of the board pretty much maxed out component count and took several weeks (albeit rare spare time) to hand route (the autorouter I was using at the time just utterly gave up.) This new design, even with all the random logic and some of the higher-level logic crammed into 12 GALs, exceeds the pin count, my measure of board density, of the previous version by nearly 30%. So, it is looking quite likely that I'll need to go to at least a 4-layer board to be sure it can be routed with the chips as close to each other as I believe they will need to be.
Has anyone used KiCAD to do 4 layers?
Does the Chinese company I have seen used for many of the recent boards do 4 layers?
What precautions, tips or best practices should I be aware of?
Any input from this great group would be much appreciated!
 
Thanks!
 
Bob Bell
 
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"John Monahan" <mo...@vitasoft.org>: Jun 19 05:35PM -0700

In KiCAD one normally posts the folder containing all the files including the .pro file. From that you can do everything, including making the Gurber files. The folder is usually saved as a single .zip file.
 

 
Within the .sch file I generally use the print menu option to make a .pdf file. (Use PDFCreator or the likes). From there you can send/print anything
 

 
John
 

 

 
From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bob Bell
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 3:17 PM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [N8VEM-S100:7267] Has anyone done a board with more than the standard 2-sides?
 

 
It was nearly 10 years ago, John.
 
I had never heard of KiCAD and since I could not afford a commercial product, I was using the free software from one of the PCB houses at the time. But even the $5000 products I used in the 80’s and 90’s could not auto-route very well. I have designed and laid out probably well over 100 boards earlier in my career, and this board was packed tighter than any other I had ever done. It is the original version of the board I am currently re-designing. The motivation for this board design was primarily to replace my 64K dynamic RAM board as it was starting to have problems, and I had no knowledge of this awesome group of S-100 enthusiasts to help me locate a replacement. Called the MemPlus, it had (has) the following features all on one S-100 board:
 
· 8-bit IEEE-696 compliant slave
 
· Two sockets for 32K x 8 static RAM chips
 
· Optional battery-backup for the RAM
 
· Two sockets for up to 64K ROM that overlays the RAM if/when addressed
 
· Flexible ROM addressing – any size for either socket on any 256-byte start address boundary
 
· Optional wait-state generator for ROM addresses
 
· Optional 24-bit extended addressing
 
· Test Input port and test output port at FF. Input port used a set of switches. Output port displayed on LEDs or hex displays.
 
· A hardware monitor with these capabilities:
 
o Display 16 or 24-bit address bus
 
o Display Data Out bus (or test output port, switch-selectable)
 
o Display Data In bus
 
o Display the important status and control signals on the bus
 
o A Run/Stop switch to stop the CPU freezing the displays
 
o A single-step switch that can step one M1 cycle or one any cycle at a time, switch selectable
 
o A hardware breakpoint that can trigger on address only, set on switches
 
· Since the TIL311 displays are rather expensive, the board exists with the option to use LEDs instead of hex displays
 
· The breakpoint address and test data input switches can use either hex rotary switches, which are very convenient, or regular dip switches.
 
· The Run/Stop, Step Type, Step One Sycle, Breakpoint Arm and Output display switches are brought out to a convenient pod for ease of use.
 
· The display portion of the board is initially attached to the main S-100 board. In this configuration, the board is 2.7” taller than a standard board. However, it can be snapped off and mounted anywhere desired. Then two inexpensive 40 pin ribbon cables (like standard PATA disk drive cables) are used to connect the two.
 
I counted the pins for this board as a rough idea of density, and in the 77 sq. inches of real-estate there are 1925 pins. That’s 25 pins per square inch.
 
Given that there are two regulators and heat sinks, two 2032-style coin cell holders, and explanatory silk-screening all over the board, I think this is a very dense board. Hence my inquiry about a four or maybe a six layer board. The update I describe below is about 30 or 31 pins per square inch.
 

 
The version two of this board has been in “spare-time” design now since December 2014. It, too had some significant motivation. Last summer I bought a version 2 of the IDE/CF board and built it hoping to augment my 8” disks. Although it worked using the utility programs to write sectors and such, I could not get it to work through CP/M 2.2. My BIOS is a mashed-up mess of what used to be the California Computer Systems (CCS) CBIOS, which has worked very well for me up till the IDE/CF board came along. After hours of troubleshooting, I learned that it should be significantly easier to get it working in a CP/M 3 system. So, I began research on how to upgrade my system to CP/M 3. I learned a lot, and as a side-project, I built a second S-100 system for testing and development (I announced on the list that it was fully operational back a number of months ago.) One of the biggest things I learned was that CP/M 3 runs a whole lot better in its banked arrangement. But I only had 64K, and although I built a second 64K board so I had 128K, I had no memory manager, and my CPU, the CCS 2810 Z80 board, is a straight Z80, with no memory management either. So, the motivation was that I needed CP/M 3 to make using the IDE/CF board easier, and I needed more than 64K of RAM to make a go with CP/M 3, and I needed a memory manager to move up from 64K. Necessity is the mother of invention, so I set out in late December to invent an upgrade to my MemPlus board with the following goals in mind:
 
· Retain the 8-bit slave flavor. I see lots of work being done with 4M and 16M boards, all in support of 16 and 32 bit processors. This is great and I enjoy reading about the trials and the successes. However, I don’t see myself going there with my S-100 machines. (I have MS-DOS on several machines built for it, including about 15 vintage PC’s from the early to late 80’s.) Instead, I am happy with trying to do as much as I possibly can with my Z80. I would entertain the idea of moving up to, say, a Z180, but that’s a whole other story.
 
· Increase RAM beyond 64K. With 512K static chips readily available, two sockets would get me up to 1M. Plenty for any 8-bit machine. This gives me enough RAM to run CP/M 3 in banked mode, with several banks for disk buffers, etc. This RAM can be addressed linearly if desired by any bus master. Include the ability to use 32K, 128K or 512K chips.
 
· Build a memory manager to handle the RAM on the board for 8-bit bus masters that have only a 64K address space, like Z80. With this, I can make use of the RAM above 64K.
 
· Retain the battery-backed RAM option and provide an easy way to bypass it if not being used.
 
· Drop one ROM socket – the second was never used on the original board, and I don’t see much utility in it. The ROM can be 2K, 4K, 8K or 16K in size, set by a dip switch. Oh, and I got rid of all the ROM configuration jumpers. When the ROM size is set by the dip switch, it automatically configures the socket. (This method is employed for the RAM too.)
 
· The ability to address the ROM on any 256 byte boundary was extreme as were the switches and logic to implement it. I dropped that addressing in favor of a much simplified scheme that permits placement of the ROM in 16 different locations above 8000H. Locations not supported can be accommodated by re-programming the control logic (discussed later.)
 
· Improve the wait-state generator to the circuit everyone uses now to make up to 8 wait-states for the ROM. Modern static RAM is sufficiently fast and I don’t believe wait state will be needed, even with 8 and 10MHz CPUs. (Note: my CPU is only 4MHz. I may be looking for a way to test this design at 6, 8 or 10MHz.)
 
· Retain the test ports, but permit their address to be any I/O port from 00H to FFH.
 
· Retain the heart of the hardware monitor, as described above, and make the following enhancements:
 
o Add a slow-stepper mode of operation that will automatically step the computer by anywhere from about 1 cycle per second up to about 1000 cycles per second.
 
o Improve the breakpoint system so breaks can be triggered on nearly any bus cycle (memory read, I/O write, Interrupt Acknowledge, etc.), any memory address (including 24-bit addresses) and any data bus content. Also, include a means of adding “don’t care” bits, so, for example, a range of memory addresses could be selected and any of them hit would cause a break.
 
o Add front-panel-like memory operations: Examine, Examine Next, Deposit and Deposit Next.
 
· Retain the flexible display options.
 
· Retain the flexible dip switch or hex switch input options, and add the ability to use off-board switches.
 
· Expand on the control pod for the main operational switches, plus add on-board switches to mimic all functional operation, so the control pod can be optional or disconnected and all the hardware monitoring and front-panel operations can be done directly on the S-100 board.
 
· Wrap up as much of the logic as possible into GALs to save space. At this point in the design, there are 12 GALs on this board, a mix of 16V8 and 22V10. There is a GAL for nearly every function on the board, such as RAM addressing, MMU control, front-panel logic, etc.
 
I have bread-boarded about half of this now, and hope to breadboard and test the remaining in a couple of weeks. The only part of the design that I believe is outstanding right now is the power supply. You probably remember how I switched my machines over to a 5 volt buss running off a switching power supply. Thus all the 5Vregulators on my boards are bypassed. But for the sake of most others, I have to figure out the power needs of this board and determine how I’m going to do the voltage regulation. I like what several have done lately with the on-board switching regulator, and if no one has a problem, I’m probably going to copy it. I just got my v3 IDE/CF card today, so I’ll be looking into that soon.
 

 
Now that I have left the cat out of the bag on this project, I welcome any and all feedback. It is probably a good point to hear if anyone has any suggestions for additional improvement or notices that I have gone off the deep end somewhere.
 

 
I have enjoyed using KiCAD to work up the schematics. It pretty much matches the power of the old stand-alone systems I used before. The biggest gripe I have right now is that it is very cumbersome to copy blocks from one sheet to another. (This design exists on 5 custom-sized sheets that are nearly C size.) I am also wrestling with the fact that I built the whole design using local names for the nets. In systems I had used in the past, all nets were global. A net named GND on one sheet was automatically connected to any nets with the same name on any other sheets in the project. I got a tip from another group member the other day that I ought to be able to change all local net names to global with a text editor. I’ll be checking this out very soon. I will also be very interested to see how the board layout tools work. As I mentioned earlier, the system I used a lot years ago had an awful auto-router and I hand-routed most boards in less time, plus I always got it 100% routed, but not the auto-router.
 

 
I would really like to post my KiCAD schematics, but I’m unsure how. If you have stuck with me through this whole email and you got here, and you know how to post files like the KiCAD files, please reply and let me know.
 

 
Bob Bell
 

 

 

 

 
From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Monahan
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 1:00 PM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [N8VEM-S100:7262] Has anyone done a board with more than the standard 2-sides?
 

 
Bob what is the circuit, I’m really surprised freerouter could not do a two layer board. I have done 80486 boards where literally finding spaces for the chips became the issue yet freerouter resolved in 2-3 days. The initial placement of chips is most critical. Try and avoid as much as possible the net wires crossing over each other.
 
Another trick is to let it run say 2 or three days. Save the file, and in KiCAD see what is not connected. Start again, but first link up by hand the previously unconnected wires.
 
Most companies these days will do multilayer boards including PCBCart. However > 2 layers are more than 2X more expensive.
 

 
Have not done > 2 layers
 
John
 

 

 

 
From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bob Bell
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 4:13 AM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [N8VEM-S100:7260] Has anyone done a board with more than the standard 2-sides?
 

 
I am working on a board design (details to appear later - it's getting close) and I am concerned about component density and the ability to route the board. A previous version of the board pretty much maxed out component count and took several weeks (albeit rare spare time) to hand route (the autorouter I was using at the time just utterly gave up.) This new design, even with all the random logic and some of the higher-level logic crammed into 12 GALs, exceeds the pin count, my measure of board density, of the previous version by nearly 30%. So, it is looking quite likely that I'll need to go to at least a 4-layer board to be sure it can be routed with the chips as close to each other as I believe they will need to be.
Has anyone used KiCAD to do 4 layers?
Does the Chinese company I have seen used for many of the recent boards do 4 layers?
What precautions, tips or best practices should I be aware of?
Any input from this great group would be much appreciated!
 
Thanks!
 
Bob Bell
 
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"John Monahan" <mo...@vitasoft.org>: Jun 18 08:36PM -0700

Unfortunately configuring a this board to come up as a IEEE-696 master (rather than a slave) is not a simple splice. The transfer of control has to take place sequentially and carefully. See the write-up here
http://s100computers.com/My%20System%20Pages/80286%20Board/80286%20CPU%20Board.htm
Go down to "Configuring the 80286 as a Bus Master with Slave/DMA controllers" for an example.
 
I'm really reluctant to plunk is a similar circuit without a prototype run. History has thought me "quickies" don't work.
 
BTW remember you can bring this board up as the only CPU board in your system (i.e. it will boot as "the CPU" on power on), it's just it will not be able to transfer control to another CPU/DMA device.
 
Gary put me on the list for two boards if you do a run
 
John
 
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Gary Kaufman
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2015 5:04 PM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [N8VEM-S100:7255] Re: Possible 8086 board run
 
Greg -
 
The only revisions made are the changes to the silkscreen and regulator. It works fine as a slave, and I suspect most of us won't need to use it as a master.
 
John's tied up with some more significant projects, and sadly I lack the sophistication to make any of these changes.
 
It should be similar to the 8088 board - which works very nicely.
 
- Gary
 
On 6/18/2015 7:10 PM, G. Beat wrote:
 
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Matthew Turner <turn...@hotmail.com>: Jun 19 03:27PM -0400

Hey Gary!
 

 
Please put me down for two of these boards. No harm having a few spares.
 

 
Regards,
 

 
Matt Turner

 
 
 
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2015 16:20:50 -0700
From: geka...@gmail.com
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [N8VEM-S100:7236] Possible 8086 board run
 
 
I'm hoping to have enough interest to justify another run of the 8086 S-100 board that John did a few years ago.
 
Thanks to John's help I have files for a slightly updated version of the board on www.s100computers.com
 
- improved and corrected silk screening
- the ability to use three options for the TO-3 regulator as per the other new boards
 
Per John's comments, the other limitation:
 
"the design of that board was my very first S100 bus slave CPU board. It did not really have the master/slave circuit flushed out properly. It's absolutely fine as a slave but if setup as a bus master it would have to be modified to pass control to another slave. (Its address, data, status & control lines would have to be inactivated by the slave when it has control) The IEEE-696 is unclear who does this, but normally the bus master inactivates its own lines. Except for the similar 8088 our other CPU boards have the appropriate circuits."
 
Please let me know of any interest - hopefully we can get a run together.
 
(I'll also price it out thru PCBWAY given Don's recent posting)
 
- Gary
 
 
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hlrj...@gmail.com: Jun 19 02:53PM -0700

Gary,
Please put me down for one board.
Thanks,
Harold Rothwell
 
On Wednesday, June 17, 2015 at 7:20:50 PM UTC-4, Gary Kaufman wrote:
"John Monahan" <mo...@vitasoft.org>: Jun 18 08:19PM -0700

Thanks for pointing that out George. Handling these actual boards is getting to be more work than designing them!
 
Fortunately almost everybody on the list are “regulars”, but just as a reminder its monahan AT vitasoft DOT org (make the appropriate letter substitutions).
 

 
John
 

 

 
From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of G. Beat
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2015 11:27 AM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [N8VEM-S100:7253] Re: A V3 version of our Dual IDE/CF card S100 board.
 

 
Typo on you paper enclosure with S-100 boards. You typed vitasofr.org !!
 

 
gb
 
On Saturday, May 16, 2015 at 6:25:11 PM UTC-5, monahanz wrote:
 
It's hard to believe but this board is now over 5 years old. It is probably our most popular S100 bus board to date. It went through two major revisions.
 
I would like to now introduce what will probably be the final version of this very useful S100 board. It’s called the V3 IDE/CF Card S100 board. The main updates are:-
 
· I did not want to change the basic 8255 driven circuit and all the software I and others have over the years written for the board. Sure if I were to do it all over again I would probably have done it different using perhaps a faster Zilog PIO or an onboard fast fully dedicated Z80 (as for our ZFDC board) or Propeller etc. The NEC or OKI 82C55-2’s are dirt common and seem to be able to handle anything the CPU sends to them.
 
· I want to hand lay down broad power traces to all the boards IC’s for more even power distribution – particularly to the power hungry HEX displays.
 
· I have inserted a trace “Keep out Area” on the front of the board so there is no danger of the IDE adaptors touching a critical trace.
 
· I have now switched to a “multi regular” voltage regulator footprint. This allows you to use either:- a 1.5Amp L7805CV, a TO-3 LM323K (3Amps), a Pololu 5 Volt , 2.5 Amp D24V25, or a EzSBC.com 3A regulator called PSU5.
 
· I did bend the no new changes rules a little and added two 22V10 GALs. This greatly simplifies the board and really speeds up the port addressing and the potential drive select/reset issues some were having. I realize not everybody is familiar with GAL’s. Please see here for more information about GALs. For those people and beginners I will supply the pre-programmed Lattice 22V10 GALs. The PALASM code is shown below. Again these GAL’s are fairly common (Jameco #39159 for the 15ns variety).
 
· Correct a potential drive A: or B: switch circuit problem described by some.
 
· I have added a wait state circuit (0 - 8 I/O wait states) to accommodate very fast S100 boards such as our 80386 and 80486 boards without requiring further generalized I/O wait states on the CPU board for other system I/O ports.
 
· People should be able to simply switch IC’s from their old board to this new one. Only two new GAL ICs and two 74LS373 are required.
 
· Last but least I relabeled much of the Silk Screen to be more relevant. For example placing IC numbers above their pin locations etc.
 

 
I have written up a description of the board here:-
 
http://s100computers.com/My%20System%20Pages/IDE%20Board/My%20IDE%20Card.htm
 
(Bottom of the page).
 

 
This time I had 4 final productions boards made by PCBCart (China) before I announced it. That way I don’t have to worry about a large batch of boards coming back with a critical design flaw. The picture on the web site is the final board, not a prototype.
 

 
Anyway I will do a group order for a batch of these V3 bare boards. Please let me know ASAP if you would like one or more bare boards. They will run somewhere between $14 - $16 each + shipping. Note batches of these boards do/will not occur often. If you even think you will need such a board, now is the time.
 
It’s best to send me an e-mail direct (monahan AT vitasoft DOT org).
 

 
John Monahan
 
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norwe...@aol.com: Jun 18 10:20PM -0400

Heh ... Heh .... Hard for youngsters to understand, indeed. Way back in the early 1970's I built a digital clock in a custom plexiglass enclosure. It has hrs., mins., and secs. (hrs. and mins. in ~.7" 7-segment LED displays (largest available at the time) and secs. a little smaller (maybe .4"?)), and is based on the Mostek MK50250 chip. Point to point wiring. It has time, alarm, AM/PM indicator, etc. It's still running!
 
Funny part is back when I first got it running, a guy came to the house to give me an estimate on reupholstering a chair and sofa. When he saw the clock (sitting on top of the TV in the living room), he went nuts. At one point, he offered to swap the reupholstery job for the clock! I'm not sure if he was serious, but at that time I wouldn't have traded it for *anything*!
 
Roger
 

 
 
 
 
 


Nice!

Sometime about this same time I built the Heathkit digital alarm clock, model GC-1092A.

Like your CLK 5, my clock still works, and wakes me up every morning to its obnoxious buzz alarm.



Bob Bell





From: n8vem...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jeff Albrecht
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2015 12:09 AM
To: n8vem...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [N8VEM-S100:7247] OT: Godbout Clk 5




I'll jump in the fire with Josh and brave an off topic post. Checkout what must be one of the first Godbout (creator of excellent S-100 systems) boards it's a clock based on the MM5314N chip. It's in my RetroWagon collection here. It works! See bottom silk screen for identification. Date is 1975.














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