Product Development

This is the page which covers the on-going development of the Coldfire card (Codename: ColdFusion Accelerator) including photographs, information and questions covering past and present prototypes.

Overall Status:

Up to this point one prototype has been made and assembled but failed due to a number of errors, a new prototype has been printed with all errors correct and major design improvements, although this card is currently not working there are high hopes that soon it will.

Current Status:

As it stands there is still no working Coldfire card, this is partly due to bad luck and partly due to a lack of time, the design is still belived to be good.

The current card includes may extra's not needed by the Coldfire to operate, these were added partly to show the power of the Coldfire CPU and partly for research. The current prototype implements a USB1.1 host interface, 400mbps Firewire port, AC97 audio codec & a 115kbps IRDA interface.

Items not inplemented on the current card include bus takeover, for if you have a CPU (68030) on the motherboard. This is mainly because it is of low priority at the moment as it is very easy to add.

Apart from that everything else is done, there are some unused pins on the Coldfire and on the Amiga's fast slot which can be connected by hand if needed but that is intentional.

The prototype uses a Motorola MCF5407 V4 Coldfire which can run at up to 162Mhz but the prototype will run at only 150Mhz, there is a 220Mhz Coldfire available but devlivery would have taken much longer than was satisfactory back with the V1 prototype so the 162Mhz version was chosen, the pinouts of the two different speeds are the same so it will not cause a problem.