Every now and again the 65CE02 gets a mention here. It was produced in limited quantities, it seems, because there are very few of these chips around. Here's the (PDF) datasheet and here's Michael Steil's (textual) technical reference.

One feature is that it has many single-cycle opcodes. US patent 5088035 may give some clues as to how that's done.



John McMaster has recently depackaged and photographed one of them: that's the first step to a possible reverse-engineering of it, like the visual6502. The bottleneck will be the polygon capture, and there's an additional difficulty because this is a two-layer metal process, so some finesse is needed to strip the top layer leaving the lower layer intact.

There's a page with some pictures here which also includes a link to a pannable zoomable image here. [Edit: broken link, so try here instead.]

Here's a block diagram from a previous discussion:

Is it CMOS or still NMOS ?

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6502 addict

From the datasheet: "...2-micron, double-level-metal, CMOS technology...".

That is a very interesting link BigEd. When I click it I see the die. There is an icon of a person, above the +- zoom bar. Dragging the icon over the die has an interesting effect...

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65Org16:https://github.com/ElEctric-EyE/verilog-6502

Looks like random logic is made of "standard cells" and I almost surely can recognize control outputs to bottom part.
I impressed how compact is chip layout, comparing to original MOS 6502.

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6502 addict

Yes, funny that.. it seems to take you to wildly different places each time. I've been at a couple of them, but the next moment I was 3000km away, in the Canary Islands. Strange.. for a 65CE02 die map!

-Tor

That "streetview" behaviour is most unexpected! You're supposed to zoom in and pan, using the mouse wheel or the zoom gadget. It's quite a high magnification available.

Cheers
Ed

Not to prolong the Off Topic discussion, but I find the south pole station intriguing, although it is labelled Mit20x, I was expecting MIT.

For On Topic, this IC is a shame to have been lost in history. Maybe it's one reason I dislike Apple product so much. This fact combined with the fact that original Mac with the 68000 had no schematics. It seemed to start a trend, and I had lost my interest in electronics for awhile.

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65Org16:https://github.com/ElEctric-EyE/verilog-6502