On Fri, 2012-11-23 at 22:45 +0100, Peter Stuge wrote:
Hi Rex,
Rex O'Regan wrote:
How hard would it be to design, source components and construct a motherboard for something simple such as a 486DX from scratch?
I am interested in doing this primarily to learn about what it takes to design a motherboard and what's in them and how the components interact.
Not very many are designing 486-class boards these days, so you will not get many answers. If you want to find out I think you have to try.
As always, keeping it simple and introducing one or at least very few unknowns each time helps the success rate.
You'll need various tooling for bringup, oscilloscope, logic analyzer, and so on. But with 500-1000 EUR/USD you can already get quite a useful lab set up! Of course not name brand state of the art, but wholly adequate for a hobbyist mainboard design.
Programmable logic is certainly one way to go, but would of course bypass the procurement exercise.
If you have time - a fun project!
//Peter
Thanks for the confidence, you make it sound like others are designing for other processors. I just chose the 486 as it seems to be about the most basic that can still be used but if there are others doing a similar thing with another class I would be quite happy to use a different class to get access to more information.
Cheers, Rex