[Simh] J-11 reverse-engineering project

1801BM1 1801bm1 at gmail.com
Sun Mar 22 17:31:43 EDT 2015


Dear. Mr. Supnik

My name is Vyacheslav Ovsiyenko, and my hobby for this time is the
reverse-engineering of the old-good-day microchips.

The first totally reversed one was the USSR-made replica of i8080A, also
known  as 580BM80A (in Cyrilic). The primary milestones of the reverse
route were:

- chip decapping
- taking a series of micro-photoes (а lot - tens or hundreds)
- stitching the sub-gigapixel pano (starting from 15K*15K resolution)
- metal, poly and diffusion layers vectorization in the CAD
- importing the vectored imgae to the PCB CAD
- creating  the  gate-kevel  scematics (4758 n-MOS transistors in the
i8080A)
- automatically creating the netlist
- creating the Verilog model
- testing, running on the FPGA platform, etc.

The more information can be found on the retro-enthusiasts forum:
http://zx-pk.ru/showthread.php?t=23349    -    the  discussion  itself
(in Russian, sorry)
The gate-level schematics - http://u.zeptobars.ru/yuot/8080/vm80a_sch10d.pdf
The Verilog project archive - http://u.zeptobars.ru/yuot/8080/vm80a_rev10j.zip

The  next  microchip  being reversed now is the USSR 1801BM1, which is
the  single-chip  CPU  based  on  the  LSI-11  architecture (not exact
clone).  Now  I  have  the  working  Verilog  model
(http://u.zeptobars.ru/yuot/1801/VM1/vm1_rev12j.rar)
and looking to the future for the next reverse candidate.

On the SIMH's site I saw the following words:
"Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to recast J-11 in more modern
technologies, from gate arrays to FPGA's. The paper schematics, and the idiosynchratic
circuit design, have defeated all efforts."

Actually  I am going to reverse the LSI-11 USSR exact clone of WD-1600
chipset first,  but  the  J-11  looks  very attractive  as well.
I bought the J11 specimen,  and  sow  the  multiple  metal and poly layers,
so the chip requires a delayering operations and much more vectorization jobs.

So, I have a question: could you be so kind and provide me with a copy
of some documents about j-11  inside.  Copy  of  paper schematics,
layer photo-masks, etc. would help a very much.

I know, it's a huge amount of work, but I'd like to try :)

Thanks in advance,
hobbyist reverse-engineer
Vyacheslav Ovsienko,
Kiev, Ukraine



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