Cranked up the Sage Tester from Gasbarro's directory. On Channel02, MPC43A, chip A, putting the pattern (LH)* in causes channels 0 through 7 to respond the same way, and channels 8 through 15 do nothing.

Fixed all the magic values that determine what bits to ship given what pair of outputs are wanted. The data bits have the high order bits attached to the even channels on one side of the chip and to the odd channels on the other side of the chip. This has been fixed in version 3 and beyond of the Channel chip and so the software must be changed when later revisions are used.

Busted the board just before leaving last night. Had all 16 channels working, one at a time, except that channel 8, and channel 9 less severely, had the 10MHz XClk coupled to it. Upon powering it up this morning the XClk was not coupled to the pin until I performed a set channel, at which time a 1V version of XClk became coupled to channel 8. BClk may not have been running since the Dicentra does not continuously generate it. Discovered that the PulseGen chip that I put my thumb on was clamping CS' to 2V and that the replacement part was one of the incorrectly bonded parts. Putting a new correctly bonded part in resurrected the system. Then playing with the pad power supply eliminated the fuzz on channel 8. This seems to be the same sort of problem as was seen in the PulseGen chip where the metal line carrying the output transistors gate voltage was narrow and that caused some sort of oscillation. Widening the metal line in the PulseGen chip eliminated the problem, we should probably do that to the Channel chip as well.

Yesterday saw all 16 channels in a single channel chip running at the same time. I had them all put out the same rectangular wave and then every other channel put out the same rectangular wave but 180 degrees out of phase. Then I plugged in a PulseGen03 chip, modified SageFace and SageTest to use the internal feedback circuit and tryed it out with no success.

Today I started probing about, finally remembered to flip the external clock select switch into the internal position, discovered that the external clock input pad is inverting and we neglected to put that inverter into the layout for the internal feedback circuit. Putting a Model 7 picoprobe, with the 50 ohm resistor removed, down, setting the external clock select back to external and connecting the probe to the external clock input pad caused the thing to start working. The waveform is really lousy, 2V to 3V sawtooth, so it just barely works but it does work.

After modifying the software to exercise the counter it became clear that the hack setup with the probe will not work. The problem is that the multiplexor for the clock comes after the tap for the control logic. Thus the external clock cannot run the internal control logic and that lousy sawtooth waveform is trying to run the counter.

We blew the feedback line and then put down a sense and force probe with a pulse generator to invert the signal. This doesn't seem to work so good. Tomorrow we should try: 1) putting a real inverter in there, and 2) just disconnect the oscillator entirely and use the single cycle feature of the pulse generator to see if the counter and the Done circuit works correctly.

Tryed putting a real inverter in with no luck, I suspect the external clock select switch was in the wrong position, have to go back to that. Tryed injecting a clock into the control logic. It appears to work although the bits inserted into the counter have to be the 16 minus the number of cycles desired.

After the last set of screwing around it finally became apparent that the clock generation circuit and the stop control circuit had conflicting assumptions about the state of the clock line when the pulse generator was idle. This caused the current implementation to be punted. I redesigned the clock generation circuit to assume that the clock was low when idle. After wire wrapping the entire control circuit there were a few bugs but we now have a pulse generator that will emit a countable number of pulses or a continuous stream of pulses.

If an alternating high low pattern starting with low is put into a channel and pulse lines 0 and 8 are used to control it then pulse line 0 rising edge causes the falling edge and pulse line 8 rising edge causes the rising edge. There is 30 ns delay from pulse line 0 in to channel edge fall and 70 ns delay from pulse line 8 in to channel edge rise.

When pulse line 0 causes a falling edge then pulse line 3 samples that edge if it is set to have its rising edge 15ns later than pulse line 0's rising edge.

These notes pertain to the new Sage Dicentra code.

It appears that the multiplexor clock will randomly start up in either position rather than being cleared by the reset.

There are two outstanding problems:

It also looks like the numbering of the input pulse lines may be scrambled since the pulse lines inside of the channel chip are labelled 0, 8, 1, 9, 2, ... If the input pulse line decoder does the obvious thing then to get pulse line 1 a two must be put into the register, etc.

Moving the reset pulse in SageImpl from before setting up the channel chips to after doing so eliminated problem 1. Problem 2 remains.

The lowest address pulse line of a pulse pair is the mux clock, not the shift clock as I had assumed. That explains why the data channels change state on what I thought was the mux clock since it is really the shift clock.

This note contains a list of things that should be put into the next generation of tester chips.

The channel chip contains a static RAM in the center of the chip with the pin electronics arranged down 2 sides of it. There are 128 cycles of data, 2 phases per cycle, 3 bits per phase. The output values encoded are {drive 0, drive 1, pulse 1, pulse 0}, the input values are {expect 0, expect 1, expect tristate, don't care}. All input values cause the output drivers to disable. There is space for 32 channels per chip. Each DUT pin has a data pin next to it that allows loading of stimulus and unloading of response. Perhaps the number of edges should be increased to 32. Seperate VIH, VOH, VIL, VOL, pins are attached to voltage comparators. Multiple sets of these voltages are provided and some bits in the channel control register select which voltage is actually used. A pin sets compare or store mode for the sensed value? Maybe just eliminate sending stored data back to buffer memory when doing sort rather than debug. Some bits in the channel control register determine the amount of active loading put on the pin.

The pulse generator chip has a more space efficient decoding mechanism, more pulse lines are provided and the length of the delay line is longer. There is a second delay line which allows the amount of time between taps of the primary delay line to be varied.