[coreboot] 486 Motherboard from scratch

Sven Schnelle svens at stackframe.org
Mon Nov 26 21:00:54 CET 2012


Hi Rex,

Rex O'Regan <rexoregan20 at yahoo.com.au> writes:

> 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.

I did exactly that back in the 90s (think 1995) with a 80486DX2. It
doesn't take much parts to get a basic system running, but you need
a lot of glue logic for RAM control and other stuff. I used a lot of
74F logic parts on those boards. The main problem was wiring all the
components on a wire wrap pcb.

Nowadays it should be much simpler with all the FPGA/CPLD stuff
available. 

Regards
Sven




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