One of my Senior Projects: Design & Development of a Microprocessor Accelerator Board
for IBM PC compatibles with Windows 95 drivers.
The card contains:
- A Motorola 68040 Microprocessor.
- A Microchip PIC 16C84 Microcontroller to manage external peripherals.
- A Motorola 68705K1 Microcontroller to manage a special keyboard.
- An RS232 input/output.
- EPROM and FLASH EPROM.
- Up to 64 MBytes of RAM.
- A network connection.
- 4 programmable Altera chips (which I programmed myself) to control:
- Bus-sizer and automatic swap of Big/Little Endian.
- Access in bus master mode to the whole PC.
- DRAM controller to automatically recognize and manage two slots of RAM module (up to 64MBytes).
- A general manager to decode and control all circuits in the board (PIC, EPROM, FLASH EPROM, RS232, Network, ...).
The software contains:
- The importing of a special real-time operating system (PsiOS).
- The description and implementation of a communication protocol to exchange datas and cmd
between the board and the PC (through a reserved area of the PC memory).
- An HDD driver that permits the board to access the HDD of the PC
in a special partition formated in PsiOS system.
- A video driver that permits the PC to access a window of the screen.
- A keyboard driver that allows for the direct use of the PC keyboard.
Project duration: 4 months.
The board was successfully tested with Windows 95 (Beta version).
Recipient of LOGITECH prize for industrially-oriented senior project at EPFL in 1995.
Last modified 17 February 1999