Category Archives: Kontron SBC860

Kontron SBC860

First of all: I do not own this card, I just list it for completeness.
Everything written here is accumulated through computer magazine articles or internet sources – if you know more or better, I’m always happy to hear from you.

This is a picture of the Kontron SBC860 (courtesy of Jörg Heilmann):

Kontron_SBC8601

As you can see the SBC860 is much higher integrated as all other i860 cards presented on this page (while it bears quite some similarities with the rev.1.6 of the DSM860-OEM/16), most parts being used in modern SMD form.
It’s a single, full-length 16-bit ISA card, featuring 8 proprietary SIMM slots for up to 32MB RAM.

As far as I can see, the SBC860 has its own bus-interface so no fancy Transputer-Links or such.
In the upper right corner of the card are two huge “pin arrays” (each with 112 pins), the left one having two blue jumpers set. Iassume this could be some sort of expansion-bus for add-ons. Interesting fact: Exactly this part was missing on the board which was reviewed in the German magazine c’t 91/3. As Jörgs card says “R14/A” on one label this might hint towards his card being a later, updated version.

The price of the card was as hefty as their competitors: 33 MHz/8 MByte 13212 DM, 40 MHz/32 MByte at ~21200 DM in the year 1991 (US$ was roughly half)

P3 = Interrupt Vector
7  10  11  12
:   :   :   :

P4 = I/O Base Address   8 consecutive Port Adresses, between 0x100 and 0x3F8

   P4              I/O Addr
==============================
::IIIII            0x300
::II:II :::        0x320
::IIII: :::        0x308
:I::III            0x200