OT: PAL binary to logic diagram

[GDan]

Hi,

While I know it's slightly off topic - does anyone on this group know
of a (preferably free ware) tool that will take a PAL binary or hex
image and draw the logic diagram for it?

Thanks,

DC

 

[Jonathan Bromley]

On Sat, 12 Jan 2008 14:38:10 -0800 (PST),
GDan <coxsterdillon@hotmail.com> wrote:

While I know it's slightly off topic - does anyone on this group know
of a (preferably free ware) tool that will take a PAL binary or hex
image and draw the logic diagram for it?

I don't; but I suspect that such a thing might not be very
useful, since PALs (and friends) have very wide AND functions
in their sum-of-products logic, and such things usually don't
make a lot of sense as a schematic or logic diagram.

It is not outrageously difficult to reverse-engineer the
logic *equations* from the fuse map, but again I'm not
aware of any tools that do that. In the distant past
I've done it by hand, but only when desperate.

It's probably worth trying to find copies of the ancient
DOS-based tools - PLPL, PALASM, CUPL, and so on. They
typically had a bunch of utility programs in them to do
such things. I just looked around at my very rusty
installations of PLPL and CUPL, and found nothing
specific I'm afraid.

The JEDEC fuse files are plain-text and can reasonably
easily be matched-up with a device's fuse map.
--
Jonathan Bromley, Consultant

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