Design of microprogrammed A/D CAMAC module

The TAD1 a relatively low cost, single width CAMAC module capable of digitizing four analog signals at rates up to 100 kHz. The TAD1 is designed around a 16-bit AMD 29116 bipolar microprocessor controlled by an AMD 2910-1 microprogram controller and a 1K x 72-bit program memory. Data is stored locally in a 128K byte memory. The principal design goal of TAD1 is flexibility. This goal was met in a number of ways: 1) Since TAD1 is microprogrammed, it can be configured for different operating environments with relative ease. 2) The initial operating configuration allows flexible data taking with pre- and posttrigger, alternating time bases, and multiple trigger sources including relative trigger timing information. 3) TAD1 is interfaced to the Dataway in a manner which allows the contents of the 29116's 32register file to be examined transparently, thus allowing the Dataway to be a much more effective troubleshooting tool than is normally the case. 4) TAD1 can be easily modified to handle A/D's up to 16 bits. 5) Because it has a fast (7 million instructions per second) processor and a large (128K byte) local memory, TAD1's architecture could easily be the basis for a number of diverse functions (FFT processor for example)