HP 64000

Models

• 64100A, introduced in 1979, was a desktop workstation which contained ten expansion slots for various optional cards. The initial offering of this workstation required an external hard disk for all disk storage, although the disk could be shared by up to six workstations via the HP-IB instrumentation bus. Later, a dual floppy drive option was added so that a workstation could be used without the shared hard drive. This workstation's CPU was the BPC, the same custom HP 16-bit microprocessor found in the HP 9845C workstation. Software and hardware was offered to develop 8-bit and 16-bit microprocessors.
• 64110A, a more portable workstation with five card slots, was introduced in 1983. Its CPU was the same custom HP microprocessor as the 64100A.
• 64120A card cage introduced in 1986. It fit the same option cards as the 64100A and 64110A, and was connected via an IEEE-488 bus to a standard HP 9000 Series 300 workstation running the HP-UX operating system rather than using a specially designed workstation such as the 64100A and 64110A. The name "HP 64000-UX Microprocessor Development Environment" was used with these systems. Software and hardware was introduced for development of 32-bit microprocessors.
• 64700A card cage was introduced in 1988. It was marketed as a lower cost development system that could be operated with an IBM PC-compatible personal computer rather than a workstation. Cards for this system carried the numbers 647xx, and were not compatible with the other systems.

  Description

Terminology

• Mainframe is the physical workstation or card cage holding the option cards.
• Host is the processor that operates the mainframe. In the 64100A and 64110A the Host Bus is the workstation processor's address, data, input/output and control buses, which also connect to the cards in the card cage.
• User system is the microprocessor system being developed. The terms user processor and user memory describe those components in the system being developed.
• Emulation or Emulator refers to optional cards and other hardware that are connected to the mainframe via the plug-in cards and can replace the processor and/or memory in the user system. Emulation and analysis cards are interconnected with an Emulation Bus that is completely separated from the Host Bus.

  Software Development

In-Circuit Emulation

• A microprocessor emulator controller card, specific to each microprocessor.
• An emulation "pod" or "probe", which contained interface electronics and was an external module to the mainframe. The processor in the user system was removed from its socket, and a cable from the emulation pod was connected in its place. The emulation pod contained a copy of the user processor that ran program code just as the user processor would, and it appeared to the user system as the normal processor.
• An emulation memory controller card and one or more emulation memory cards. The emulation memory could be used to substitute for memory in the user system so that, for instance, user program code could be placed in the emulation memory and executed rather than needing to program ROM chips.
• An "internal" analyzer card, which was a logic analyzer that monitored the operation of the emulated processor and memory.
• Emulator software that allowed the operator to start and stop the emulated processor, examine the contents of memory and register locations, measure signal timing, observe program flow, and so on.

• 64151A Emulation Memory Controller, which had 16 address lines so could address 64 KB of memory, and
• 64155A Wide Address Memory Controller, which had 24 address lines so could address 16 MB of memory.