I currently have several products based around the Intel 80188 microcontroller and it it soon to become obsolete. I believe another company make pick up the production but I thought I'd better have a few safety nets in case they don't.
One idea I had was for a (probably VHDL) 80188 core that I could run in some suitable FPGA/CPLD. I've heard of PICs and ARMs being created as IP cores and I wondered if anyone knows of an 80188 one?
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They mention the 80186 + peripherals, not the '88, but they also mention "selectable 8/16 bit bus multiplexing"
Hope this helps,
Roberto Waltman.
PS: Don't bother downloading the PDF "Product Brief", the link is broken.
"Tom Lucas" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@iris.uk.clara.net...
This one might get you started,
Hans
Well they do say it is software compatible with the 80188 which is quite promising. Even if it is purely 80186 then altering the existing code to work on that is going to be much much less work than porting it all to an ARM or similar. It also mentions that it can be used with the Paradigm debugger which is also appealing.
Plus I imagine I can throw all the UARTs, buffers and address decoding latches into the same device and save myself a large amount of board space.
The programming models of the 80186 and 80188 are identical, (as were the original 8086 & 8088), so no effort should be required to port software from one to the other. The bus interface unit is different, of course, and this will matter if you want a FPGA implementation packaged as a pin-compatible replacement. If you want to run the bulk of the existing code while allowing for some redesign, as your following paragraph suggests, then there are several 8086 cores available. Just replace the 80188 built-in peripherals (either on-board in the same FPGA or as external chips)
Roberto Waltman
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