Sunday, April 17, 2011

6800 Visual Simulation

Thanks to Jorge Cwik who's joined our preservation and modeling effort, we've got a complete set of polygons for our Motorola 68A00P, made in 1986.  Jorge worked in a standard vector drawing app, Corel Draw, and has written scripts to help with the work.  He's provided data in SVG as well as extracted a netlist for the chip.  After converting to our visual sim format, many folks on the Visual6502 team helped debug the netlist and bring the chip up in simulation.  Our wiki entry for the chip links to the simulation and other 6800 material.  Enjoy!
http://visual6502.org/wiki/index.php?title=Motorola_6800


Even better - Jorge is eager to get started on other chips, and in fact, he started modeling a famous Atari chip before discovering our project.  Way to go, Jorge!

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Motorola 6800 delayered

We've posted a step-by-step description about what we do to look at all of a chip's parts: Motorola_6800_die_shots.html
This features five high resolution die shots of a Motorola 6800 chip as we remove layers of material one by one. Each of the die shots is aligned, so by loading them into a paint program on different layers, you can flip between them to get an idea for what's what.

We have a similar breakdown for a custom Apple Lisa chip, a 341-0064A, which is actually a National Semiconductor COP421 customized for Apple. A gate-level model of this rare chip will be a great asset for computer history.