Tutorial on Programmable Logic Devices?

[Dave Nubury]

Can anyone point me in the direction of some tutorials on PEEL's.

I just picked up a couple of Z80 processor boards on EBay. I was going to
try and i/o / memory map the board by tracing the IC's
until I ran into a few of these suckers. Looks like they are being used for
decoders. I've got to try and figure out how they
are programmed so I can make sense/use of my controller board. I downloaded
a .PDF for PEEL18CV8P, but I'm still confused.
Is there any easy way to figure out how they are programmed?

Thanks,
Dave

 

[Rich Webb]

On Sun, 22 May 2005 21:07:43 GMT, "Dave Nubury"
<remove_me_david_nugent@hotmail.com> wrote:

Can anyone point me in the direction of some tutorials on PEEL's.

I just picked up a couple of Z80 processor boards on EBay. I was going to
try and i/o / memory map the board by tracing the IC's
until I ran into a few of these suckers. Looks like they are being used for
decoders. I've got to try and figure out how they
are programmed so I can make sense/use of my controller board. I downloaded
a .PDF for PEEL18CV8P, but I'm still confused.
Is there any easy way to figure out how they are programmed?

They are generally programmed with a hardware description language (HDL)
like VHDL, ABEL, CUPL, ... Looking at the fuse map would allow you to
trace out the functions but, like having disassembled program code into
bare assembler instructions, you'll still have some work to do to
understand it. You'll need a gizmo like
http://www.needhams.com/products-EMP21.html to read it.

Note that if they've burned the security bit, you will not be able to
read the fuse map. All you can do is look at the goze-ins and goze-outs
and take it from there.

If you assume that the designers didn't intentionally obfuscate things,
then you can probably work out the intended behavior by what it connects
to.

--
Rich Webb Norfolk, VA

 

[R. Steve Walz]

Dave Nubury wrote:

Can anyone point me in the direction of some tutorials on PEEL's.

I just picked up a couple of Z80 processor boards on EBay. I was going to
try and i/o / memory map the board by tracing the IC's
until I ran into a few of these suckers. Looks like they are being used for
decoders. I've got to try and figure out how they
are programmed so I can make sense/use of my controller board. I downloaded
a .PDF for PEEL18CV8P, but I'm still confused.
Is there any easy way to figure out how they are programmed?

Thanks,
Dave
------------------

If all they are is address decoders, then they are static logic,
with no dynamic/sequential logic contributions, in other words,
a simple gate array with no feedback loops. That means you can
map them by simulating inputs to their inputs and watching their
outputs.

But if they are not, then lots of luck! I have the specs on
programming 18V8 Peel devices, but again, if the security is
set, you have only external testing to arrive at their gate
circuit equivalent. You could go through random addresses and
write a program to look for any outputs that have differing
results with the same inputs, and that would fine any sequential
logic statements.

-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rstevew@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew
Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!
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