Create a VAX CPU with FPGA?

[Zane H. Healy]

At 2:14 PM -0500 3/4/05, Heinz Wolter wrote:
>A better way would be to look at what this prof in Japan did -he's written a
>complete working
>pdp11/40 on a smallish altera fpga- - it even runs UNIX V6! and had an IDE
>hd interface.
>http://shimizu-lab.dt.u-tokai.ac.jp/pop11.html pictures here:

OK, this is seriously cool, and it's the first time that I've heard 
about this project.  I'll have to take a good look at this and update 
my Emulation website to contain information about this (I've got an 
FPGA section that covers all FPGA implementations of DEC CPU's that 
I'm aware of).

>http://shimizu-lab.dt.u-tokai.ac.jp/pop11pics.html
>here is the paper
>http://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/asp-dac/2004/2543/00/25430571.pdf
>Get the files here: http://shimizu-lab.dt.u-tokai.ac.jp/ and note the VAX
>780 project announcement.
>They show here that they are nearly complete on their VAX 780 on a chip
>project.
>Both the 780&11/40 are written in SFL - a nice but unpopular C-like HDL.
>This PDP is not microcoded.
>The tools are freely downloadable as well as the PDP11/40 source - so you
>can play
>on winblows and linux. I got both versions of the 11/40 to run but alas..
>they don't boot V6.

I'm wondering if they don't have a modified Unix V6 to handle the HD, 
or are they emulating a known DEC Drive?  Any idea what it would take 
to boot something like RSTS/E, or RSX-11M+ on this?

>Sad, as I wanted to use this as a front end to my PDP10 project written in
>SFL;) As far

Your what project?

		Zane



-- 
--
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
|                                  | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
|     Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing,    |
|          PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum.         |
|                http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/               |