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ND Unibus Converter¶

ND 110015

[Photo: Close-up of electronic circuitry on a circuit board]

ND

Norsk Data

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ND UNIBUS CONVERTER¶

Introduction¶

The ND 110015 UNIBUS CONVERTER — UBC — is an interface between the ND-100 bus and a UNIBUS system. The UBC gives the possibility to connect a wide range of UNIBUS peripherals and devices to an ND system. The user has to write the device-dependent software.

The UNIBUS was introduced with Digital Equipment's (DEC) PDP-11 in 1970. It was the first bus on a minicomputer to enable devices to send, receive or exchange data without processor intervention or immediate buffering in memory. Despite all further improvements of the PDP-11 systems, the specifications for the UNIBUS remain the same as in 1970. This makes UNIBUS one of the most frequently used bus systems for minicomputers. Different vendors are making everything from array processors to plotters that can be connected to UNIBUS systems.

Product Description¶

Hardware¶

The UNIBUS is a single, common path that can connect processors, memory and peripherals. The bus consists of 56 lines used for control, address and data. Communication between any two devices on the bus is in a master-slave relationship. The maximum transfer rate on the UNIBUS is 2.5 million 16-bit words per second.

The ND UNIBUS Converter (UBC) represents an interconnection between the ND-100 bus and a UNIBUS system. The UBC is designed as a standard ND-100 board, and occupies one slot in the ND-100 crate. The UBC is connected to an external UNIBUS crate (not supplied by ND) by a cable (max. length 5 meters). The UNIBUS devices are connected to interfaces (i.e. DR-11W) in the external UNIBUS crate by a bus cable (max. length approx. 300 meters). Note that the external UNIBUS equipment is not delivered by Norsk Data.

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ND UNIBUS CONVERTER¶

Software¶

Since a lot of different UNIBUS devices exist, it is impossible to make any software that handles all of them. The approach has therefore been to create an environment suitable for making the device-dependent software part. The writing of this software is left to the customer. The software environment for doing this consists of a monitor call and a universal interrupt-handler. Writing UBC software will now involve writing a device-dependent application program and a device-dependent server program. The application and server communicate by messages using the monitor call. This monitor call handles context switching, copying of receive/send messages, and timeout events in case of no reply. It is up to the programmer to define the relevant commands for a specific device. A typical command from the device-dependent application to the corresponding server, may be to dump a datablock to a UNIBUS device. To perform this transfer, the server has to set the contents of the different registers on UBC and on the device interface in the UNIBUS crate, using the IOXT instruction.

This approach implies that new software must be written for each new type of device connected via UBC.

Test Software¶

Both online and offline test programs for the UBC exist. The offline program tests read/write of registers, etc., and the online program tests the DMA capability by using a DR-11B DMA interface that loops the input and output lines.

Specifications¶

The UBC requires one slot in the ND-100 crate.
Up to 2 UBCs per machine
Up to 8 UNIBUS interfaces on the first UBC, 7 on the second
Maximum block length 32KBytes
No burst allowed
Only word transfer allowed (even number of bytes)
Read-Modify-Write not allowed in UBC
Burst transfer speed is about 2 MBytes/second
Typical maximum effective transfer speed is about 0.5 MByte/second

Requirements¶

The UBC will be available on the ND-110 Compact, ND-110/CX, ND-500/CX and ND-5000
Runs under SINTRAN-III/VSX ver. K or later

Documentation¶

UNIBUS CONVERTER Hardware Manual ......................... ND-12.036 EN
PDP-11, UNIBUS, DR-11W and DR-11B are trademarks of Digital Corporation.

Diagram¶

        +-----------+         +---------------------------+
        | ND-110/CX |         | External UNIBUS-crate     |
        |           |         | w/power and DR-11x        |
        |           |         | interfaces                |
        +-----------+         +---------------------------+
             |                         |
             | UNIBUS cable            |
             |                         |
             |          +-----------------+        +-----------------+
             +----------| UNIBUS-devices  |        |                 |
                        +-----------------+        |                 |
                                       \           |                 |
                                        -------->  |                 |
                                                   +-----------------+

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