Advantest A09506 SRAM card emulation

[hve]

I always wanted to find an SRAM card for my nice old R3265 spectrum analyzer, but these things are nowhere tobe found. And since I have this thing open on the bench I thought let's hook up a logic analyzer.

I dont have a card myself, but after some digging I found this patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US5584044A seemed quite usefull:
Japan Electronics Industry Development Association (JEIDA), for example, has recently proposed an IC Memory Guideline. In the IC Memory Guideline, Third Edition, JEIDA defines a connector having twenty pins. A memory card with an SRAM has eight terminals to input and output data over an 8-bit parallel transfer bus. The eight terminals are used not only to read and write data in the memory chip of the memory card but also to designate the addresses of the memory chip. Therefore, such a memory card has two extra terminals or state terminals for discriminating data and addresses from each other...

So far I only have a la dump from the device at bootup, just to get a bit a feel for the timings. It is in the zip with a vcd file and a gtkw file for the curious.

Read write cycle times on the bus are 14 usec.
CS,WR,RD pulse times are 2 usec

Should be possible for a small 5V compatible microprocessor to emulate this probably.
For example the CH32V103, 80MHz, 20KB SRAM, 64KB CodeFlash may be able to emulate a 32k sram card.


As far as I know these cards where used in:
- Advantest R3261
- Advantest R3265/A
- Advantest R3271/A
- Advantest R3361A/AN/B

And I have found these types Avantest cards:
- A09505 32KB Memory Card
- A09506 128K Memory Card
- A09507 64KB Memory Card
- A09508 256KB Memory Card
- A09509 2M Memory Card

[dmendesf]

Is this a PCMCIA SRAM card?

[serg-el]

https://cloud.mail.ru/public/T3wm/4tCqGENG9

Greetings.
 If you've decided to build a card emulator,
I'm happy to provide additional resources on the topic.

[hve]

Is this a PCMCIA SRAM card?

Probably on of the earlier versions of the familiar standard with 68 pins. The Advantest operation manual mentions that these cards are based on JEIDA. There is an interesting Japanese article on the evolution of memory cards on the PCMCIA. wikipedia page, machine translated version is in the attachment.
"... The first specifications were published by JEIDA in September 1986 as "IC Memory Card Guidelines Ver. 1. After the publication of Ver. 1, revisions were made to Ver. 2 in 1987 and Ver. 3 in 1989. Ver. 3 specified four pin counts: 20 pins, 34 pins, 40 pins, and 68 pins. ..."

So this version 3 of the memory guidelines is 20 pins, so that matches the Advantest cards. The patentin the first post mentions this version as well and has a pin-pin interface compatible with the Advantest.

Interesting rabit hole.

[hve]

https://cloud.mail.ru/public/T3wm/4tCqGENG9

Greetings.
 If you've decided to build a card emulator,
I'm happy to provide additional resources on the topic.

Very nice!
I have included the logic analyzer trace for a card format (gtkwave / vcd) of course the format returned with card read only error as the slot was empty...
Anyone feel free to share.

[hve]

I created a simple test rig based on an RP2040 board.

This can be plugged in directly into the ribbon cable connected to the main board.