General > General Technical Chat
Unidentified Circuit Boards
chrisward:
While tidying up, I've unearthed a set of 5 boards, which I obtained from an electronics surplus "junk shop" some years ago. I have no idea what it does and wonder if someone might recognise it. Two of the boards have a set of 4 AMD 2901 bit-slice processors on, two more are memory cards and I think the last has some I/O on it.
I've attached a photo of one of the processor cards; The identity/mod record label says "carte" and the serial numbers are go up to 500-odd, so I wonder if this is French? - and they made quite a few of them. Module names are "CIPA" to "CIPG" (there's no "D" or "E"). Chip date codes are mid-80s.
Anyone any ideas?
Black Phoenix:
I've worked in telecommunications in Portugal and those cards and code name are kinda similar to the old BSC (base station controller) from Alcatel Lucent.
But it was a short time that I service such equipments (back in 2010 they were being decommissioned when I started) so I could be wrong.
Benta:
Size/connectors indicate VME board.
Very common for Motorola M68k systems. Odd is, that 50% of the board is populated with AMD ICs.
chrisward:
Hello, Thank you for your suggestion. I had wondered (indeed, hoped) that there was a standard bus somewhere, which would make reverse-engineering a bit easier. But the J1 pin-outs (ground connections - I haven't reverse-engineered the whole boards) don't match. [Shadowing the analysis Dave did with the voltage regulator about 2 weeks ago!] The J2 connectors, I have the backplane module for, and it's very much "point-to-point", not a bus.
I agree, they are Eurocard size, so DIN connectors are most likely; I saw a few different systems using those at that time, though not connected with VME. The AMD devices is why I bought the two sets - I was trying to understand microcoded architectures at the time. (Hopefully, one to analyse, and possibly break, and the second one to see if I can get that one going.)
Regards,
Chris.
chrisward:
To Black Phoenix, thank you for your suggestion (and apologies to Benta for not acknowledging him by name in my reply - I'm new to this system of communicating!). I had a look on-line (at Alcatel products) to see if I could find anything even remotely like what I have, but as mine predate the Internet by about a decade, not surprisingly without success. Hence posting my question here, hoping - admittedly a very long shot - that someone who watches Dave's videos (and also looks at this forum!) might actually recognise it. Because of the age of the boards (30 years), I would think anyone who ever worked with them would probably have to be near or past retiring age, which lengthens the odds even more.
But, you say Alcatel-Lucent board naming is (was!) similar to that on my boards? Do you mean the "CIP" names or what I presume to be a drawing number, which I see on the "carte" labels*, they are all of the form "5111.199.5xyz", so I wonder whether anyone recognises that format for drawings with their company; perhaps I should have mentioned that in my original "posting", but I've only just thought about that (and gone back to the boards to look at them again!)
(* at least, that's what we did where I worked at the time, though in the silk screen or top/bottom copper layers.)
Regards,
Chris.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version