Consideration For Building Target Hardware For Use With MON960

Consideration For Building Target Hardware For Use With MON960

This article describes some considerations for an 80960 target board which will incorporate the use of the MON960 debug monitor.
1. A spare communications port: > Mon960 requires the use of a serial communications port. This can be either an RS232 or RS422 port and a PC that communicates with it.

2. An Intel 82510 DUART, a National 16552 DUART or a Zilog Z85C30 UART:

   The source code for these drivers are supplied with MON960. If you have one of these devices, you can use the driver code with minor address modifications. If you do not have one of these devices, use one of the supplied device drivers as a model when writing your own.

3. An interrupt line:

   An interrupt line is required for the ability to break out of a running application. It is advisable to use the highest priority interrupt available to minimize the chances of being blocked by higher priority events.

   Note that the MON960 serial communications is done in polled mode so this feature is not necessary for the proper operation of the monitor.

4. 64K of ROM

   MON960 requires 64K of ROM space when built with both the Host Interface and the User Interface. You need only 32K of ROM space if you build the monitor without the User Interface. If the User Interface is removed then you won't be able to talk to the monitor directly from a terminal or terminal emulator program. You will only be able to use it with a tool that uses the HDIL (Host Debug Interface Libraries) such as DB960, GDB960 or EXE960.

5. 16K RAM

   The monitor reserves 32K of RAM for data.

6. LEDs

   For debugging, LEDs on the target are very useful. The monitor source code has built in diagnostics which blink LEDs when it reaches certain initialization routines. However, the calls to the LED blink routines are not necessary for the proper operation of the monitor.