Summary

This project is an SOC (System on a Chip) coded in VHDL and implemented for the Lattice iCE40-hx8k dev board. The SOC contains the following components: 8085 CPU + UART + Timer + I/O Ports

Required Hardware

• Lattice iCE40-hx8k dev board (can be ordered online at www.latticesemi.com)
• USB-to-Serial 3.3V adapter (can be ordered from eBay)
• misc USB cables and wires for connecting the USB-to-Serial adapter

NOTE: Make sure the USB-to-serial adapter is a 3.3V version. Some adapters have 5V interface signals which could damage your iCE40-hx8k dev board.

Tools

• IceCube2 (from Lattice Semiconductor) was used for synthesis and FPGA Routing.
• Icestorm (https:/github.com/cliffordwolf/icestorm) was used for programming.

Build Flow

I used the Lattice IceCube2 software to generate the SOC_bitmap.bin programming file and then I used this command line "iceprog SOC_bitmap.bin" the program the iCE40-hx8k dev board over the USB cable (iceprog is part of the icestorm tool suite).

Console Interface

I used the minicom program (on Ubuntu Linux) as a console to communicate with the 8085 SOC over the USB-to-Serial connection. Configure minicom using the command line "minicom -s" to configure the serial port for ttyUSB0 and turn of the hardware handshaking. There are probably other alternatives to minicom. Any ANSI terminal-emulator program should work for this application.

Pinout

The iCE40 pins are defined as follows:

UART_RXD   G1 -pullup yes
UART_TXD   G2
PORTA[0]   B5
PORTA[1]   B4
PORTA[2]   A2
PORTA[3]   A1
PORTA[4]   C5
PORTA[5]   C4
PORTA[6]   B3
PORTA[7]   C3
RESET      N3 -pullup yes
CLK        J3 -pullup yes

Memory Map

The memory map of this SOC is as follows:

0 -> 0fff  4k bytes of RAM

I/O Map

The I/O map of this SOC is as follows:

00 -> 07   UART  registers
08 -> 0b   Timer registers
0c         Output register
0d         Interrupt mask register
0e -> 0f   Random number generator
10         Interrupt source register

8085 CPU Background Info

The 8085 was introduced in 1976 as the successor to the popular 8080 microprocessor. The 8085 added two instructions to enable/disable three added interrupt pins (and the serial I/O pins). It also simplified hardware by only using +5V power, and adding clock generator and bus controller circuits on-chip.

Like the 8080, the 8085 had a 16-bit address bus and an 8 bit data bus. Internally it had seven 8-bit registers (A, B, C, D, E, H, and L). The register pairs BC, DE and HL could be used as 16 bit registers. It had a 16 bit stack pointer to memory and a 16 bit program counter. It also had 256 I/O ports, so that I/O devices could be hooked up without using any memory address space.

Contributors

• Scott L Baker - SOC design

License

See the LICENSE file in this repository