Author Topic: Why are ALE and INTA not floated during Hold on an 8088 while other outputs are?  (Read 836 times)

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Offline David00Topic starter

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When the 8088 goes into hold, every output is tri-stated apart from HLDA (obviously), ALE and INTA. Given that the purpose of hold is to allow an external device to control the bus, like a DMA controller, what's the rationale behind ALE and INTA still being driven?

I think I partly know the answer to this:

If INTA wasn't driven high, it might float low and accidentally cause an interrupt vector to be placed onto the data bus causing contention.

If ALE wasn't driven low, it might float high and accidentally latch some spurious low-order address data, so that when the CPU came out of hold then A0..A7 would be incorrect. But this wouldn't matter, would it? As after exiting hold the next instruction's T1 cycle would cause the correct low-order address lines to be latched. 

 Is it simply that ALE doesn't NEED to be tri-stated, so this capability wasn't added by Intel?

« Last Edit: November 28, 2020, 02:08:15 pm by David00 »
 


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