Unknown Atmel

[ycrcb]

I am currently playing with some old Aston video character generators, and while cleaning the various PCB's,
i try to identify the different IC's.
But this one have until now evaded any identification attempt. (see attached image)

ATMEL
AVM 2
F6A1842

and

ATMEL
AVM 2
82000854
B6A2676

Any info will be highly appreciated.

[Ampera]

Broadcast character generator?

Welcome to undocumented ASIC city.

[ycrcb]

Uh, sounds complicated.
Are these "dumpable" like an eeprom, or are they more like a gate type thing...?

[Rerouter]

Bottom line is the date cose and fab location, so thats out,

The other 2 don't leave me with any results either.

http://itersnews.com/?p=103763

This was about the best lead I could find on the type of processing those chips may be doing.

[Ampera]

Uh, sounds complicated.
Are these "dumpable" like an eeprom, or are they more like a gate type thing...?

No, what I mean is if this is even mildly specialized professional gear from pretty much any time before 2000 or so, when this all got computerized, it's going to be /full/ of application specific, undocumented chips that, unless you call up the manufacturer perhaps, you'd never get even so much as a description of what it does, unless you can tell from context.

If you can't find it on the internet, it's very likely you'll never be able to find it, the pure insane number of custom spun chips in these sorts of machines is mind boggling.

[free_electron]

audio video mux. the 4x4 arrangement leads me to believe this is a crosspoint switch.

[dexters_lab]

like others have said it looks like a custom asic made by Atmel for Aston, maybe a custom gate array type thing rather than a full asic, they are pretty much unknown 'black boxes' without some details from those that designed it.

i have seen similar Atmel parts on some of Quantel's boards

[free_electron]

QCS : quad crosspoint switch

[dexters_lab]

Not in this case i don't think, my quantel guru thinks they are custom combiners for YUV+key video as they sit between some FPGAs and some Ratheon filters but back to the case in point... it shows how hard it is to work out without schematics or block diagrams

if the OP posts up some pics of all the cards in the system we might be able to infer what some of it does