No, not that kind of “quickie”. Instead, it is about Volume V of the ALDs – now tested – in just over a week! This was due to a couple of related factors. The first 30 pages were address registers – continuation from the end of Volume IV. Then after a few more pages, the memory address register pages were up.
The second factor was a new testing technique. For cases where there are and or and/or or or gates that are similar (fed from a character of storage or another register), I started using a test vector generated from an integer counter, and then checked the results using straight-forward logic equations derived from the Instruction Logic Diagrams (ILDs), which allows me to zoom through those kinds of pages.
I also evolved how I test control signals. I typically don’t test those exhaustively with a loop (especially when they feed a latch or trigger), but I started a copy-paste routine with the variables that lets me build the tests a bit more quickly.
I really wish VHDL had a macro facility or call by name (or reference) capability, though, so I could write procedures that modify signals in a test bench. It would allow me to write generic and, and/or and or tests for various numbers of variables. Sure, I could generate the HDL with an external program, but that would actually take more time than the copy/paste technique I am currently using.
Volume V is the first volume that uses NOR (primitive DTL) for actual logic. NOR logic also shows up in gated input interface signals, but that is a different animal. I was only about 90% confident of my interpretation of some of those circuits, but so far they have been spot on.
Volume V did present a few challanges. First, another missing page: page 14.18.04.1, part of the zone adder, was missing in action. It was clearly a copy/assembly error when the drawings were assembled – page 14.18.05.1 appears twice on both sides of the same sheet: one of those shoud be 14.18.04.1.
Now, I could easily have just replicated the ILD as equations, but I took it a bit further than that, consistent with what I have done on other missing ALD pages. Research based on the card location chart uncovered that I had one card at 11C3A16 (type DEV) entirely dedicated to this page, though the chart only showed four of the seven gates on that card actually being used. I also discovered that the card at 11C3A17 (type DFS) had 3 gates dedicated to the cause and by elimination of a gate or two that appeared on other sheets I was able to determine which gates/pins were “available”. I struggled for a day to make it work with just 6 gates (3 from the DEV and 3 from the DFS) but I couldn’t find a way. So in the end I drafted the remaining 3 gates from DEV (which are a AND/OR triad) to complete the task. While this doesn’t agree 100% with the card location chart, who is to say that the card location chart wasn’t quite right. 😉
I did find a couple of ILD errors in this volume. On page 17 of the ILD, relating to ALD page 14.30.06.1 a couple of signals are inverted and depicted as feeding OR logic. In reality, these signals are inverted on the inputs (-Y – negative active) and ANDed together. It happened because that ALD happens to depict a single NOR gate as two – one feeding the other – because that card has more inputs than can fit on a single logic block in an ALD. The symbols on the gates on the ALD do indeed imply that all the inputs are ANDed together, but if one didn’t spot that both blocks involved are the same card gate, one could easily misinterpret it. Curiously, the same thing happens on page 14.30.05.1 (the previous page), but in that case the engineer who prepared the ILD interpreted it correctly.
Those same blocks on those same two gates allowed me to leverage a feature on my application. When I entered those logic blocks, I realized that they were, in both cases, the same gates. However, since they are next to each other on the ALD they were not candidates for using the “extension” capability to combine them – there would have been room for that on the page, but they were not depicted as extensions. So I moved the inputs from one of the gates of the pair to the other, and removed the output from that first one as well. When I first tried generate the HDL, the application noticed the unconnected gate and generated a (harmless) error. However, a while back I added the ability to tell the application to ignore a given logic block when generating HDL. Worked like a charm.
Another case where I ran into that sort of thing was on the real time clock, where a given switch “deck” was split in two, and also the block title — which I used to generate the name of a switch signal — was replicated between decks. In order to generate this correctly I had to tweak the logic block titles to separate them, and join the switches together in the test bench.
The ILD’s also, generally, did not include the gates for address wraparound from x9999 to 00000 for 60K and 80K – only for 20K and 40K machines. The wraparound logic was present on the ALDs however, and was easy to decipher. (Wraparound for 100K is automatic because there are only 5 digits of addressing. 10K machines to no support wraparound at all, if I recall correctly)
I discovered a typo on a signal name on page 14.17.10.1 “-S AR BUS GRD OUT THP0B” — GRD should be GTD (gated).
ILD figure 24 had an error relating to page 14.16.04.1 om calculating the Address Register Exit Channel “C” bit – at the least it didn’t match the ALD. In general I defer to the ALD after carefully checking the logic, figuring that the ALDs are later in the timeline than the ILDs.
I also found a case of a misleading signal name, where the signal name implies two factors in an AND, when there are actually three. However, going back I can’t seem to find it – I will update this page if I come across it.
Finally, I have come to dislike a certain idiom that has appeared on a handful of sheets, where a pair of latches are ins sequence, usually named “… Control” and “…” where the output of “…” resets “…Control”. A real pain to devise a test bench.