Category Archives: TRAM Documentation

Deciphering the INMOS IMSB430

The IMSB430 is a rare, yet interesting and important TRAM. It’s been meant for hardware developers to easily build and test prototypes before producing actual PCBs.

Interesting enough, next to no documentation besides a sales brochure has survived. So it’s time for reverse engineering… again. This is also an official call for help – If you by any chance know more about this TRAM, please contact me!

Here’s the left side of this size-4 TRAM. The other half is just the prototyping grid with lots of through holes which we can omit here.
I tried to number all jumpers on the board starting at the top – numbers in brackets are the jumper-numbers actually printed on the boards silk-screen. That numbering is a bit confusing and seems not to follow any logic.

IMSB430 Map

IC connections

Buzzing through all lines from/to the GAL leads to this table so far:

1 ProcClkOut 20 VCC
2 A13 19 Mem0 (IC2B „/CE“ + JP26)
3 A14 18 Mem1 (IC3B „/CE“ + „J20“)
4 A15 17 1Wait (IO 2-above JP8)
5 notMemCE 16 2Wait (IO above JP8)
6 WaitSEL0 (JP8) 15 3Wait (IO below JP8)
7 WaitSEL1 (JP9) 14 SelWait (MemWait+ IO below JP9)
8 Map0 (JP10) 13 BLK0 (IO below JP10)
9 Map1 (JP11) 12 BLK1 („IO1“ below JP11)
10 GND 11 (I/OE) GNDed

Each SRAM socket is actually a “double row”.
If you seat your SRAMs aligned to the right, they will be accessed word-wide (16bit, D0-A15). When aligned to the left, they are accessed byte-wide (8bit, D0-A7). That’s why the silkscreen print says “IC2B/IC2W“…

Jumpers

This is the official press photo. It seems to show the default jumper settings (using the full 64KB SRAM, word-access):

IMSB430_official

Some jumpers are already identified (“JP” precedes the official jumpers, “J” is my numbering):

Jumper description
 1  MemWait (FIT=GalPin14, else ????)
 2  DisIntRam (FIT=use internal RAM)
 3  ProcSpeedSel0 (FIT=HoldToGnd T222)
 4  MemReq (FIT=no request)
 5  EventReq (FIT=no request)
 6  MemBacc (FIT=word access)
 7 (JP6)  ProcSpeedSel2 (FIT=HoldToGnd T222)
 8  BootFromRom (FIT=BootFromLink)
 9 (JP7)  ProcSpeedSel1 (FIT=HoldToGnd T222)
JP8 Set MemWaitstate Bit0
JP9 Set MemWaitstate Bit1
JP26 Connects /OE with /CE of IC2 (upper SRAM)
J20 Connects /OE with /CE of IC3 (lower SRAM)

The external RAM access wait-states can be set with JP8/9:

JP8 + JP9 = 2 clock-cycles per MemAccess
JP9 = 3 clock-cycles
JP8 = 4 clock-cycles
none = 5 clock-cycles

To be continued…