Electronics > FPGA

Programming (non-JTAG) MAX7000 devices

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migry:
Gutted, hit some key combo and lost all my text!!!!  >:(  >:(  >:(   :palm: Now to start over again.

Quite some time ago just as RoHS was coming into force, some bright spark had the idea to throw out all leaded components from the lab (where I worked at the time) into the skip, where it would go straight to landfill. Sort of ironic really. The whole point of RoHS was to prevent this kind of hazardous waste going to landfill!

Luckily I got wind of this and managed to rescue some rails of ICs before they were thrown away. I also got my hands on a couple of EPROM/PAL programmers and an EPROM eraser.

Recently I have got into retro compuiter projects. I have been playing with different FPGAs. I recently designed some 68000 CPU boards and used GALs for the first time. As mentioned in other threads I used WinCUPL without too much bother, and one of my (rescued) programmers supports GALs.

At that time some of the devices rescued were MAX7000 devices. These are older devices that DO NOT support programming via JTAG. These are 5V devices and it would be really useful to use them in some future projects. I have 8 EPM7128s, and lots of EPM7064 and EPM7032's. See attached picture.

Unfortunately my programmer only supports the JTAG version of these devices, and even then requires an adapter board, which I do not have and cannot find any information about.

Now I am sure some of you will be telling me to sell these devices and buy some JTAG compliant versions and use the Altera Byte Blaster. Good advice, but since these devices were FOC I really would like to use them.

I have searched the internet and cannot find any programming information for these (non-JTAG) devices. I realise it is quite common for manufacturers to keep this information confidential, perhaps they make money by selling the algoritms to programmer manufacturers? I did tweet Intel, but they didn't bite, and I got no reply.

What to do?

I could buy a new programmer, but these cost around $1000, so this is of no interest, not for a few devices....perhaps if I didn't already have a programmer.

I did have a crazy idea, but perhaps someone can suggest a better way...

There is an excellent site http://matthieu.benoit.free.fr/ which has loads of information about various EPROM/FLASH/PAL/GAL/MICRO programmers. There is even a few hints about the pins used for programming the MAX7000 devices.

So if I could run some old Win95 or DOS software for one of these old programmers which supports the non-JTAG MAX7000 devices under Linux Wine (?), then perhaps I could trace the I/O writes to whatever parallel ports and use it to figure out which pins of the programmer are been driven. Forgot to mention that for at least for one programmer there are reverse engineered schematics. Does anyone think that this can be made to work? Can you trace I/O writes in some way using Wine?

Anyway time to post before I accidently delete it again
--migry

BrianHG:

--- Quote from: migry on September 23, 2020, 08:04:47 pm ---Now I am sure some of you will be telling me to sell these devices and buy some JTAG compliant versions and use the Altera Byte Blaster. Good advice, but since these devices were FOC I really would like to use them.


--- End quote ---
I thought the ByteBlaster, ByteBlaster II, and ByteBlaster MV did support all versions of the MAX7000, as well as the even older MAX3000 series.

bingo600:
Wasn't there something about , if jtag was disabled and protection set on a 7000.
Then you'd need a special (expensive) programmer to reset it.

/Bingo

migry:
I just googled and found an Intel(Altera) document.

https://www.thailand.intel.com/content/dam/www/programmable/us/en/pdfs/literature/ug/ug_bbii.pdf

In a table of supported devices:-

MAX 7000S devices - 5V (this has a JTAG port)
MAX 7000AE (this has a JTAG port) and MAX 3000A (not familiar with this device) devices - 3.3V

The Byte Blaster has only a few pins so cannot do the "parallel" programming, but it does have enough pins for JTAG connections.


--- Quote ---Wasn't there something about , if jtag was disabled and protection set on a 7000.
Then you'd need a special (expensive) programmer to reset it.

--- End quote ---

Apparently if some kind a security fuse is programmed on the JTAG devices, then the devices cannot be erased by means of the JTAG connector.

I am looking to build in  some way a cheap version of the "expensive" programmer.

--migry

joeqsmith:
They support JTAG and could be programmed with the bit blaster, byte blaster and master blaster.

See the following data sheet:
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/programmable/us/en/pdfs/literature/ds/archives/m7000.pdf

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