Current inexpensive programmer for 22V10's 16V8's?

[Bruce Abbott]

Does the Stager vS4800 support that 40 pins atf2500?
if not, what other programmer support that 40 pins atf2500?

Sadly, no. One that does is the Phyton ChipProg480 , which costs US$595.

[andi8086]

Hi Bruce,

I wanted to say thank you for the programmer schematics and win 3.1 software I built it this week and everything worked out of the box.
I could program my Lattice 22V10D and 22V10B without any problem. So now you know that the D version also works perfectly.

Especially the D version made problems with the Chinese TL866CS, which always said that bit 32 is wrong and scrambled the whole fuse map...
Some people suggested that the chips might be too old, but since everyone has had the problem with bit 32, this was very unlikely. All chips worked
with your AFTBlaster

And it even works with over a meter cable length... so no need to keep it 4 inch in length...

I started to port the win 3.1 software back to QBasic to work with standard MS-DOS software ^^ . And I definitely will add opto couplers to the schematics
because yesterday, when I plugged in the printer cable  and switched on 12V programming voltage, win 3.1 suddenly went to text mode, which means some driver crashed. Everything is still working but who knows...

[PCB.Wiz]

I'll bump this thread, with this news/link, looks like a new effort, and mentions usb<->parallel dongle operation.

https://github.com/kees1948/perlblast

perlblast
a Perl-Tk implementation of galblast/atfblast that uses the parport device (even via USB!)

'perlblast' is a Perl-Tk implementation of 'galblast' (by Manfred Winterhoff) and 'atfblast' (http://www.bhabbott.net.nz/atfblast.html).

The main drive for 'perlblast' is that it does run on Linux. I tried 'galblast' under Windows XP in a virtual machine but always the parallel port access was troublesome, Some other programs to access the parallel port from a virtual machine worked very well....

I learned and tested also the use via an usb<->parallel dongle, that turned out to function very well too :-)

As the code is now it interfaces to the simplified hardware GAL/ATF Blaster v2.1 as found on http://www.bhabbott.net.nz/atfblast.html

I am working on another hardware project for GAL/ATF programming that can handle various VPP and VCC settings. In that design I took some more measures to block any dangerous voltage from the GAL back to the parport.

[andi8086]

Wow, very cool! Still people around who love Perl instead of Python?

[Giuss]

A software compatible with Windows 10 would bè nice

[technix]

The latest version of TL866II Plus software has added support for ATF22V10.

The guy behind this can add support to a chip if you can send him some samples for him to test on.

[PCB.Wiz]

The latest version of TL866II Plus software has added support for ATF22V10.

The guy behind this can add support to a chip if you can send him some samples for him to test on.

Nice to see an expanding SPLD list there..

This on their website  (http://autoelectric.cn/EN/TL866_main.html)
Version: V8.08 Support:15411--2018.10.30  ADD: ATF16LV8C ATF16LV8CZ ATF16LV8CEXT  SST26VF032B
FIXED: SST26VF064B

Version: V8.07 Support:15401--2018.10.23 ADD: ATF16V8C ATF16V8CZ ATF16V8CEXT ATF22V10C ATF22V10C(UES) ATF22V10CEXT
ATF22V10CQ ATF22V10CQ(UES)  ATF22V10CQZ ATF22V10CQZ(UES) ATF22V10CZ ATF22V10CZ(UES)

Version: V8.05 Support:15360--2018.10.20 ADD: ATF20V8B ATF20V8BL ATF20V8BQ ATF20V8BQL  ATF22V10B ATF22V10BL ATF22V10BQ ATF22V10BQL

[netdudeuk]

And this from a few days ago -

FIXED: GAL22V10B

[Per Hansson]

I have built prototype hardware for the AVR GAL programmer, and am now debugging the firmware. I refactored the code and expanded it to support ATF16V8 and other GALs, and also added back in some features from GALblast that the author of Burnit had removed. This has taken a bit longer than I expected.

The ATmega328 only has 2K RAM so all static data is placed in ROM, and the (up to 5896 bit) fusemap is stored as individual bits in an array of 737 Bytes (unlike GALblast which uses 1 byte per fuse bit. Oh the joys of PC programming, where RAM is plentiful so you can afford to waste it!). This would be no problem in assembler, but C doesn't support bit arrays directly and AVR GCC has some issues with arrays in ROM. It took me 3 days to figure out why the config array wasn't working. Turns out that just declaring the array as PROGMEM wasn't enough, I also had to access the array elements with pgm_read_word(). If I didn't the compiler generated no warnings, but read from the wrong address!

Hi Bruce, Any further updates on this project? I think there would be a fair bit of interest in this.

Seconded, I'd like to try it even if read functionality is all that exists so far

[PCB.Wiz]

The latest version of TL866II Plus software has added support for ATF22V10.

The guy behind this can add support to a chip if you can send him some samples for him to test on.

PLD support is now looking quite good.

Test vectors seems to be missing, so I asked them to add that & I've sent them an example Test Vector file for ATF16V8

They can do IC test on logic, so the building blocks are already there, so PLD test vectors should be possible.

[technix]

The latest version of TL866II Plus software has added support for ATF22V10.

The guy behind this can add support to a chip if you can send him some samples for him to test on.

PLD support is now looking quite good.

Test vectors seems to be missing, so I asked them to add that & I've sent them an example Test Vector file for ATF16V8

They can do IC test on logic, so the building blocks are already there, so PLD test vectors should be possible.

That would be very awesome if doable.

[ebastler]

The latest version of TL866II Plus software has added support for ATF22V10.
The guy behind this can add support to a chip if you can send him some samples for him to test on.

Are you in touch with the manufacturer?
Any chance they could add support for the ATF15xx CPLDs?

(Yes I know, these are old... But they nicely bridge the gap between PLDs and FPGAs. And they are the last parts still in production which have 5V supply versions and PLCC packages. One of their major drawbacks is that the "official", single-purpose USB adapter from Atmel and Kanda seems like the only available tool to program them.)

[PCB.Wiz]

The latest version of TL866II Plus software has added support for ATF22V10.
The guy behind this can add support to a chip if you can send him some samples for him to test on.

Are you in touch with the manufacturer?
Any chance they could add support for the ATF15xx CPLDs?

(Yes I know, these are old... But they nicely bridge the gap between PLDs and FPGAs. And they are the last parts still in production which have 5V supply versions and PLCC packages. One of their major drawbacks is that the "official", single-purpose USB adapter from Atmel and Kanda seems like the only available tool to program them.)

I think the FT2232H can be used for ATF15xx, and there are many boards with FT2232H on them.
eBay/aliexpress have FT2232H boards for sub $15, and I see a LCMXO3LF-6900C-S-EVN is $25.20 on Digikey.
We've used a Lattice CPLD breakout board as a FT2232H carrier, to PGM ATF15xx ( isolate the lattice CPLD first )

I think the Altera Byteblaster is also a menu option on the Atmel ISP SW, so you could also look for those cables.

Of course, it would be great if the TL866II Plus, supported HV Programming of ATF15xx (no lost pins) and also Vector Tested them.

[PCB.Wiz]

That would be very awesome if doable.

An email reply from my follow up yesterday, indicates this is on their 'to do' list, to add to TL866II Plus,  which is good news

[technix]

The latest version of TL866II Plus software has added support for ATF22V10.
The guy behind this can add support to a chip if you can send him some samples for him to test on.

Are you in touch with the manufacturer?
Any chance they could add support for the ATF15xx CPLDs?

(Yes I know, these are old... But they nicely bridge the gap between PLDs and FPGAs. And they are the last parts still in production which have 5V supply versions and PLCC packages. One of their major drawbacks is that the "official", single-purpose USB adapter from Atmel and Kanda seems like the only available tool to program them.)

If you can send a few samples to the author he will be able to implement support using those as test chips.

[Per Hansson]

I want to thank Bruce Abbott for his work on atfblast.
I had a system that had a National Semiconductor GAL16V8 manufactured week 6 1993 let out the magic smoke on Friday before the Christmas holidays.
I built the minimal programmer, with pulldown resistors on the I/O's to support the GAL chip.
I then programmed a Atmel ATF16V8B with a dump pulled from a similar system, but it did not work because of a hardware difference (three mod wires not existing in the schematics I could get for this ancient system).
Finally I got a reply from the manufacturer of said system after the Christmas holidays, lo and behold they had a dump saved with a date code of 1992 and it worked
I was doubtful at first because the code looked very different, but atfblast seemed to handle the extra padding zeroes without complaining at all.
I attached the dump received and how atfblast read it after being programmed to the Atmel chip for the curious.

I did run into an issue though, atfblast 3.1 lists compatibility with: Windows 3.1/95/XP
However it failed to read anything on both a Windows 2000 desktop machine, and also a Thinkpad T40 running Windows XP SP3.
After some Googling I saw that on an older version of Bruce's website there is a file called "ATFBlast_ALL.zip" that contains a user mode program for LPT port access called "UserPort"
This allowed atfblast to work well on the Windows 2000 machine but not the Windows XP machine.
I later found another such program called "AllowIo" it's website is dead but you can also reach it here on archive.org
That program worked fine on the Thinkpad running Windows XP, I have attached the two usermode programs here in case they will be hard to locate in the future.
Note that a few posts back user "marinovsoft" posted a version with proper I/O handling for Windows NT based kernels, however it is the galblast version that lacks support for Atmels GAL chips.
The Perl version linked above by PCB.Wiz is probably useful, but I gave up before I could get Perl-Tk installed in Windows.
It's probably trivial in Linux however but I could not be bothered to boot my Linux machine up to test, mainly because it's physically located in such a way that plugging in the programmer would be difficult

[donotdespisethesnake]

The ATmega328 only has 2K RAM so all static data is placed in ROM, and the (up to 5896 bit) fusemap is stored as individual bits in an array of 737 Bytes (unlike GALblast which uses 1 byte per fuse bit. Oh the joys of PC programming, where RAM is plentiful so you can afford to waste it!). This would be no problem in assembler, but C doesn't support bit arrays directly and AVR GCC has some issues with arrays in ROM. It took me 3 days to figure out why the config array wasn't working. Turns out that just declaring the array as PROGMEM wasn't enough, I also had to access the array elements with pgm_read_word(). If I didn't the compiler generated no warnings, but read from the wrong address!

Did you make any more progress with this USB-Arduino version?

[TomS_]

I got a "TL866II plus" today, and can confirm that it was able to program an Atmel ATF16V8B. I do have some 22V10's as well but havent yet tried these (they are listed as one of the supported parts, however.)

Given it can also program a boat load of other things, it seems like a good option if you need an "all in one" type device, and not overly expensive (£45 or so).

[olin]

I ported Bruce's design to Arduino UNO. Works with linux over serial connection. Schematics, sources and gerbers can be found here:
 
https://github.com/ole00/afterburner/

Thanks to Bruce and Manfred for sharing their findings about GALs.

[johnkenyon]

Does any one know if the programming solutions posted in this thread for Lattice 22V10's will work with some neolithic AMD devices?

I've managed to get hold of some tubes of unused but old AMD PALCE22V10H-25/PC4 devices that I wouldn't mind using to reduce the glue logic chip count on some 8 bit micro projects.

Looking at the AMD datasheet at
https://datasheet.octopart.com/PALCE22V10H25PC4-AMD-datasheet-115211.pdf
and the 1998 Lattice datasheet at
https://www.latticesemi.com/-/media/LatticeSemi/Documents/DataSheets/PAL/PALCE22V10PALCE22V10ZDataSheet.ashx?la=en

the ordering codes are identical, even down to the "blank, /4 and /5" options for the programming designator.

Are these a "drop in the programmer" as well as a "drop in the board" replacement for the Lattice devices?

I don't want to waste money building a programmer if it's unlikely to work.

I've also got some PAL16L8DCJ marked "MMI" which may or may not have been preprogrammed (in which case they are useless).
A little less enthusiastic with these devices given their non-erasable nature - I'd rather cut my teeth on the erasable 22V10s first.

Thanks
 

[olin]

I don't want to waste money building a programmer if it's unlikely to work.

GALBlast states : "It can not be used to program AMD PALC and PALCE, ICT PEEL or Atmel ATF chips."
ATFBlast is based on GALBlast  and added support for Atmel ATF chips.
Afterburner is based on ATFBlast and did not add support for any additional devices.

So I'd guess the chances to programm AMD PALCE on these programmers are slim - only if PALCE chips used the same programming algorithm as Atmel ATF (still some software change might be required).
On the other hand Lattice GALs can be programmed by all above programmers.

[Per Hansson]

What olin writes is true, I have tried it myself and it does not work.
It actually pulls down the voltage of the programmer too.
I remember reading somewhere that on a dedicated programmer the same thing happens:
Overcurrent warnings, so there must be something quite different with them.
Even though they supposedly are electrically the same, really weird...

[olin]

I've updated Afterburner and added support for Win32/Win64 and Osx64. Also released pre-compiled binaries for these.  All located on the github link I wrote in few posts above.

[marinovsoft]

Hello, all!
I modified the atfblast program by Bruce Abbott for win32. It works on Windows XP/7/8/10, x86 and x64 Windows version supported. You can download from https://bitbucket.org/marinovsoft/atfblast (source code included). The program uses the inpout32 driver from http://www.highrez.co.uk/downloads/inpout32/

New vesion of galblast (minor fixes) is here https://bitbucket.org/marinovsoft/galblast

[romhunter]

Hello, I'm trying to build the ATF blaster, one question though. In the schematic 4.7k is used to pull the GPIO to 5V. Is it possible to use 10k instead? Because I've read the page that ATF blaster is based on, it has one section that mention this:

Use 4k7 resistors to connect all VIL pins to the GND pin (we use 4k7 instead of the 10k mentioned in other documents, because some GALs have internal pull-ups of only 50k and illegal input states would occur using 10k resistors). Use 4k7 resistors to connect all other pins (including GND and EDIT) to the VCC pin to prevent open inputs during programming.