Fairchild Semiconductor

Overview

The F8 is actually a number of chips.

The 3859 and 3870 devices will also be covered on this page. Those units are actually single chip microcomputers and would be an alternative to the F8 rather than a supporting unit. All of the devices require a +5V and +12V source. With a 2MHz clock, instruction execution times range from 1 to 6.5 machine cycles or 2 to 13 microseconds.

Here is a pin diagram of the 3850 CPU and 3851 PSU.

[image of F3850 pin diagram] [image of F3851 pin diagram]

The pin designation is as follows:

3850 CPU Pin Assignment Description
Pin Name Description Data Flow
DB0 - DB7 Data Bus Lines Bidirectional
PHI, Write Clock Lines Output
I/O 00 - I/O 07 I/O Port Zero Bidirectional
I/O 10 - I/O 17 I/O Port One Bidirectional
ROMC0 - ROMC4 Control Lines Output
EXT RES External Reset Input
INT REQ Interrupt Request Input
ICB Interrupt Control Bit Output
RC Clock Oscillator Input
XTLX Crystal Clock Line Output
XTLY External Clock Line Input
Vss, Vdd, Vgg Power Lines  

CPU Information

The 3850 CPU is consists of only the following:

It has no memory addressing logic. Memory addressing regsters are supplied by one of the support chips. The Stack Pointer, Program Counter, and Data Counter are also maintained on the memory support chips. The F8 system is such that memory addressing logic will be duplicated if more than one memory device is in a system. There is a work around to solve the address contention problem. However, that subject will be covered later.

The two main advantages of not having memory address logic on the CPU:

Register Information

This diagram shows the organization of the F8 system registers.

Note, there is one 8-bit Accumulator. The 64-byte scratchpad area can be thought of as 64 bytes of RAM, or as 64 8-bit secondary Accumulators. The instruction set allows the first 11 bytes to be accessed directly as secondary Accumulators. The other bytes can only be accessed using a type of implied addressing where the ISAR (Indirect Scratchpad Address Register) identifies the scratchpad RAM location. Since the 3850 does not have a Program Counter, Data Counter, or Stack Pointer, these registers are provided by the suport chips. The instruction set provides for register to register moves that move data between the scratchpad RAM and the Program Counter, Data Counter, or Stack Pointer. On the 3851 PSU, 3852 DMI, and the 3853 SMI devices, a 16-bit Data Counter (DC0), a 16-bit Data Counter Buffer (DC1), a 16-bit Program Counter (PC0), and a 16-bit Stack Pointer (PC1) are implemented.

If a stack is needed, it has to be implemented in software. The instruction set is relatively brief with 70 instructions. The opcode summary is also available here. Of course by today's (RISC) standards, that is still a lot.

Since address registers are present on every PSU, DMI or SMI device in an F8 system, these registers will be duplicated in any system that has more than a minimum amount of memory. As long as the sytem is correctly configured, this should present no problem.


Colophon

Disclaimer: This document in no way represents Nyx. All opinions and errors are mine alone.
lowell.turner@ieee.org