80296SA Evaluation Kit

The 80296SA Evaluation Kit is designed as a turnkey method for embedded developers to evaluate the 80296SA microcontroller in a real-time environment, using a variety of flexible memory configurations. The included evaluation board allows you to take full advantage of the power of the 80296SA pipelined architecture and signal processing capabilities. The evaluation board contains 256k bytes of FLASH, 128k bytes of 8-bit SRAM and 64k words of 16-bit SRAM, which are upgradeable. All control lines, address lines and data lines are provided to headers for peripheral connections. Both external and internal UARTs are provided with RS232 interfaces for communication to a host PC or other application. The board also includes two led banks providing easy diagnostics.
A variety of software development tools are also provided in the kit. Included are a flash-resident Reduced Instruction Set Monitor (RISM) that allows PC-hosted development tools to communicate with the evaluation board over a provided serial interface. Intel¬s easy-to-use software package ApBUILDER, is also included. ApBUILDER provides a graphical representation of the peripheral configuration options of the microcontroller, which are then converted to your choice of ªC¬ assembly code. The evaluation versions of the software development tools that are provided will allow you to compile, assemble, download, debug and execute example code, or your own code, on the board.
For new designs, the board comes configured with a variety of available memory configurations and communications interfaces to make it flexible as both an evaluation platform and a development prototyping vehicle. For existing MCS(R) 196 designs looking for increased performance, the evaluation board is drop-in socket, and binary code compatible with the 8XC196NP and 80C196NU processors.
The downloadable zip file located below is the software interface between the host system and the user code running on the evaluation board. It provides basic debug capabilities, including loading object files into system RAM, examining and modifying variables, and executing and stepping through code.