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PDP-10 Clone Microprocessor in FPGA

Project Basics

This project is aimed at reviving the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 mainframe of the 1960s-80s, by cloning it as an microprocessor implemented in an Xilinx Spartan-II FPGA, on an SPARTAN2+ prototype board. Later I may make some custom hardware.

This is actual hardware (clone), as opposed to software (emulators), such as ts10 or SIMH or KLH10.

Project Status

For more info on this project read the README file.
For some questions people have asked or may ask read the FAQ list.
For the done/doing/todo of the project read the Log file.

Code Download

Current (= development, = may be broken): Milestone 3 (from 2002.06.25): Milestone 2 (from 2001.12.29): Milestone 1 (from 2001.05.16):

Auxillary documents

These are files I made while investigating various aspects of using FPGAs:

ASCII art of Virtex CLB PIPs
list of Virtex BRAM PIPs
Pinout Xess XC40-010E board
Pinout Xess XSV board
Pinout APS V240 board

Usenet discussions

Various threads of alt.sys.pdp10 that pertain to FPGA cloning:

My alt.sys.pdp10 archive
Early discussion of cloning an PDP-10 in an FPGA
Announcing this project
Modern IO devices for PDP-10 on a FPGA
Who is working on PDP10 hardware emulators/fpgas?
Links to PDP-10 Emulation Webpages
Doug Conroy's PDP-4 done, mentions his PDP-10 plans
Discussion of emulating/replacing IO devices

External Stuff (Links)

Various other peoples websites with usefull PDP-10 stuff:

PDP-10 index, 36 bits forever!
DEC 36-bit computers
DECsystem-10/DECSYSTEM-20 Processor Reference Manual
DEC PDP-10
PDP-10 Software Archive
Project: ts10 (KS-10, KL-10, VAX)
SIMH (many systems, including PDP-10)
KLH10 (KL-10, KS-10, with NIA20 networking)
SPARTAN2+ FPGA Prototyping Kit, the board I am going to use

Home | Projects | PDP-10 FPGA clone

This page is by Neil Franklin, last modification 2002.06.25