Close

DIN 41612 too difficult to route.

A project log for Backbone Bus

Backbone is my proposal for an off-chip, Wishbone-inspired backplane interconnect that supports multiple bus masters.

samuel-a-falvo-iiSamuel A. Falvo II 05/30/2016 at 16:330 Comments

When trying to break traces out from a DIN 41612 plot on a 2-layer PCB design, I found that it was possible only with great difficulty; it required a lot of surface area that otherwise had no other components. This represents a lack of efficiency, and drives the cost of the board up significantly. It also lengthens the individual traces to well beyond four inches, so additional termination circuitry would definitely be needed. Since this backplane is not intended for industrial use, I am not able to justify the cost of a 4-layer board to myself right now.

But, if I only have two rows of pins instead of three, I can route the bus very efficiently indeed. In fact, it can be done entirely on a single side of the PCB, leaving the other side free to be a ground pour.

So instead of a single DIN 41612 connector, I'm thinking I should instead use two or three co-linear 2x20 box headers instead. You know the kind: they were used to connect parallel ATA devices like harddrives to PCs for years. Because of their ubiquity, they're dirt cheap (two box headers still comes to about 66% the cost of a single DIN 41612 connector), and if my math is right, increases the minimum length of a plug-in card from 3-ish inches to 4-ish inches. In other words, the average cost increase of a larger PCB is mostly offset by the lower cost of the connectors, and so it should be a wash, price-wise.

The only disadvantage that I can see is that I'm losing 16 pins, which means I will have no room whatsoever for upward expansion. Moreover, I'm losing a large number of +5V pins as well.

My plan is to break the bus up into two connectors, giving me a total of 80 pins to work with. Each row is segmented into four pin groups: 3 signal pins and one ground pin. The grounds are staggered; this way, no signal is more than two pins away from a ground. This leaves a total of 60 signal pins left over.

In connector J1, you'll find an 8-bit subset of the Backbone bus. D0-D7, A1-A7 for register select purposes, and A56-A63 for I/O device decoding. As well, you'll find WE, SEL0, STB, ACK, CLK, RESET, and CDONE pins. These should be sufficient to, for instance, wire up a number of 65C22 or i8255 chips, or some other similarly simple 8-bit interface. Note that there's no need to monitor CYCA here, since if SEL0 is asserted, it will be because a cycle is in progress. What you won't be able to tell, though, is if the bus transaction is part of a read-modify-write transaction. But, honestly, that information is rarely useful except in multiprocessor configurations anyway. This results in the cheapest possible board configuration; a PCB can be even smaller than the original design, at just about 2" long on a side.

In connector J2, you'll find D8-D15, A8-A23, SEL1, and the remaining bus mastership pins. This lets you take full advantage of the 16-bit data path, the complete address space, and/or the ability to master the bus.

Discussions