ICE-85 hardware consists of two printed circuit boards, the Control board and the Trace board, and two cable assemblies, the ICE-85 module and the External Trace module. The two PC boards are inserted in adjacent slots in the Intellec chassis, and connect to each other through an auxiliary connector furnished in the ICE-85 package.
The ICE-85 module, with its three ribbon cables, connects the Control and Trace boards and the microprocessor socket in the user system. The module, an enclosed PC card, contains buffering and timing logic, and also contains a set of connector pins for access to signals used to coordinate the ICE-85 operation with external events.
The External Trace module, an enclosed PC card on a single ribbon cable, presents a set of 18 hardware channel probes that you can connect to the signals on your system that you desire to monitor. The card contains buffers for these 18 probes. The 18 channels from the buffers are available to ICE-85 for the control of trace and emulation.
The ICE-85 program resides in Intellec memory along with the Intellec Monitor and diskette operating system software. This program is written in PL/M, Intel’s high-level language, and runs under the Intel Systems Implementation Supervisor (ISIS-II). The ICE-85 program recognizes and translates your commands from the console, and places the encoded results in a control block for the hardware to read. It also retrieves the hardware-modified contents of control blocks and translates the contents into formats that you can easily understand.
However, the internal communication between ICE-85 and the Intellec system is transparent to the user. With ICE-85 installed and running, you enter ICE-85 commands interactively at the Intellec system console. Each command is executed immediately as it is entered. The commands provide a wide range of controls over all aspects of the operation of your system.
ICE-85 also performs extensive self-diagnosis during on-line operation. It checks the Intellec bus interface during initialization, checks for the absence of system clocks, verifies loading of ICE-85 registers, and verifies data written to user memory (data verification can be disabled for certain items at your option). When an error is detected, ICE-85 halts emulation or command processing, and displays an error message at the console.
To complement the ICE modules, the Intellec Development System hosts all other tools necessary for microprocessor development work. The Intellec text editor is standard system software; it enables the designer to create and edit source programs quickly. The ISIS-II diskette operating system provides high speed file handling and mass storage facility. The Universal PROM Programmer peripheral for the Intellec system can be used to program any Intel PROM.
PL/M-80, Intel’s high-level language for the 8080 and 8085 systems, reduces the time required for software development by allowing the programmer to write code in a self-documenting, natural manner. The PL/M-80 compiler handles time consuming tasks like managing register usage, allocating data memory, and optimizing code. Using the relocating assembler, linker, and loader, programs can take advantage of PL/M-80 for general programming needs, and also incorporate assembly-language portions of code for critical timing loops or I/O procedures.