UK government in 3-way design of 16-bit VME SBC

UK governmentin 3-way design of 16-bit VME SBC An SBC based on the Z800I segmented 16-bit microprocessor has been developed by UK company Arcom with Zilog and the UK Department of Industry. The ARC8000 is aimed at three application areas. • • •

in business; as a general purpose computer as an industrial control processor to be used with Arcom's I/O boards as the central processor in a VME bus computer system

figured as a parallel printer port if needed. The 8036 has 20 I/O lines and features such as four handshake modes and the possibility of operating as a 16-input interrupt controller. There are two bus connectors on the double Eurocard-sized board. One is used to link to the existing range of Arcom I/O boards. The other is a VME bus connector. (Arcom Control

The computer can handle almost any serial protocol, according to Zilog. There is provision for encoding in NRZ, NRZI or FM and decoding in these three plus the Manchester format. Other features included are twin baud rate generators, two phase-locked loops and provision for auto echo and local Ioopback. Parallel I/O is provided on board with a Z8036. There are two independent 8-bit double buffered bidirectional I/O ports, with a 4-bit special purpose I/O port. These can be con-

Systems Ltd, Unit 6, Robert Davies Court, Nuffield Road Industrial Estate, Chesterton, Cambridge, UK. Tel: (0223) 522642)

The Z8001 runs at clock speeds of up to 10 MHz. There is provision on the

Menu-driven graphicssoftware puts 3D on IBM PC can be stored, retrieved and edited. The package comes in two versions: Chartman I, displaying in black-andwhite, dumping onto Epson MX80 and 100 printer (with Graftrax) and printing onto HP7470 2-pen and HP7220 8-pen units. The Chartman II has colour displays and can print colour charts onto I DS Prism colour printers and plot onto IBM XY750 plotters. Prices are £295 and £395 respectively.

Menu-driven graphics for the IBM personal computer has been released. The package, called Chatman, will produce bar charts, 2D and 3D pie diagrams, and logarithmic line charts. The package is aimed at business use. It needs 'little or no training' to use, says the developer, Bonsai. Data is entered by filling in screen layout blanks or by interchanging rows or columns with packages like Visicalc, Microplan 4, TKSolver and others that support Data interchange format. Once charts have been created, they

TEN Z8OOl-based SBC that works with VME bus board for four EPROMS with capacities of 2, 4, 8 or 16 kbyte. The maximum is 64k. Alternatively, eight CMOS RAMs of 2 or 8 kbyte can be used. A Z8030 serial communications controller provides two RS232 ports. Each has its own baud rate generator capable of operation at up to 1Mbit/s in asynchronous or synchronous (bisync, monosync, SDLC and HDLC) modes. F o l l o w i n g up something y o u ' v e just seen? Please mention Microprocessors and Microsystems

vol 7 no 3 april 1983

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Graphics on the IBM personal computer

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