Starting the ALU board

The instruction decoder and the arithmetic/logic unit are so tightly coupled that they really should be on one board. Of the 70-some inter-board connections, better than one out of three connect only these two boards. Thus it makes sense that the layout of these two boards, and the pin-out of the remaining connector pins, be accomplished in parallel.

Here's the start of the ALU board layout:

As with the other boards, I've used "wires" drawn on one of the documentation layers to sketch out the various pieces. The four horizontal areas containing components represent the four-bit data path through the ALU. The right-most group forms the input value "register" (really a transmission gate to capture the data bus, two inverters to generate true and inverted versions of the data bit, and a pair of push-pull drivers). Moving right to left, the remaining groups are the carry predictor, the carry output driver, the adder, and the true/complement selector. The group on the far left is a combination of the bidirectional shifter and the accumulator register. Since the accumulator's value may need to remain stable for long periods of time, it includes a built-in refresh circuit to keep the charges from leaking away.

The odd collection of rectangular areas in the lower left represent the so-called "Keyboard Process" logic, a translation table of sorts that converts a one-of-four accumulator value (0/1/2/4/8/*) into a 4-bit binary output value (0/1/2/3/4/15). I was surprised to find such a function implemented in hardware, but apparently they felt it was a reasonable speed vs silicon area trade-off.

There's still a good bit of circuitry to be placed on the board outside of the sketched areas. The original layout of the data path occupied the entire width of the sketched area, but clearly that can be narrowed significantly. So much so, that I may rotate the whole area 90 degrees. We'll see once I get some routing done.

Clearly I'm not going to have boards ready to be fabbed in time to get them back by Christmas. But maybe I'll be able to spend some of my holiday break on the project.