The Sinclair QL Forum

The 68020 lives again, through a company called Tekmos. Through a collaboration with Motorola, they reverse-engineered the old 68020 to produce a compatible replacement.

See: http://www.tekmos.com/products/68020-microprocessors

twellys wrote:The 68020 lives again, through a company called Tekmos. Through a collaboration with Motorola, they reverse-engineered the old 68020 to produce a compatible replacement.

See: http://www.tekmos.com/products/68020-microprocessors

Looks like they're based in Austin, Texas. Nothing to with Sandy Dave I take it???

Hi Dilwyn,

The Super Gold Card has a 68EC020FG25 surface mount soldered the the PCB under the Clock Battery.

To use the TK68020, a 68020/68EC020 adaptor would be required, which would mean removing the 68EC020, attaching the surface mounted adapter to accommodate the 68020.

I have data sheets for an adaptor from Ironwood Electronics, which could do this. See attached PDF.

Whether QDOS/SMSQ/E would cope with 68020 CPU is unknown and there would need alterations to Glue chip, which uses an obsolete Altera chip.

The adapter and new TK68020 are easy to do, but as normal with Super Gold Card hardware, the Altera Chip source code is unavailable. Unless there is a modern day alternative.

Maybe easier to start from scratch and make a new 68020 card with 4Gb ram...

I suspect you're right. The Super Gold Card is quite an old design and a new fairly basic 68020 interface with only the facilities needed for a modern QL system would be better than just building a new batch of Super Gold Cards anyway. I'm sure the experience of people like Paul with the QL-SD and Jose Leandro with the new Qubide show that there is a small but worthwhile demand for new hardware relevant to the needs of the QLers of 2015.

Bit disappointed that best speed is 33MHz, I would have hoped with modern fabrication methods we might have seen 100MHz. But I guess they are being made as replacements or new for embedded market (existing proven designs). I understand they were popular as traffic light controllers.

I know one of the people involved with this company. It has a good number of former Motorola/Freescale employees.

I do have a few 68EC020 around here somewhere.

Well if you want to go ridiculously fast!

http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=1&note=2679

Dave wrote:I know one of the people involved with this company. It has a good number of former Motorola/Freescale employees.

Do they have any plans to do small hobbyist order sizes or to have any kind of suppliers who would - I came across them earlier for HC11 as well but their parts seem unorderable by any small volume supplier.

I honestly have no idea.