Info for anyone who's playin' with GPIB (like me):
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INES GmbH, manufacturer of 7210 and 9914 compatible GPIB chips, discontinued their DIL40 and PLCC44 designs though they told me some weeks ago everything is running well.


If this is of interest for you read their statement:

Olaf



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leider muß ich Ihnen mitteilen, daß die ines iGPIB 9914A und
die ines iGPIB 7210 abgekündigt werden. Auch den Verkauf unserer
ISA Karten, auf dem wir den iGPIB 7210 Chip verwenden, werden wir
in naher Zukunft einstellen.

Zur Begründung lesen Sie bitte folgende Erklärung:

in the last months we have tried with many technical solutions
to solve the problem with the difficult power supply in the old
1 power pin based PLCC44 and DIL40 cases.

We have splitted and doupled the bonding of the power pin inside
the case and we have used layers of the chip for power supply and
ground (as we have a 12 layer full-custom chip design) but all
efforts didn't eliminate the poor power supply based on the 1 power
pin. Based on its new C-Mos technology and 40 MHz speed the chip
needs so much power for its switching peaks that 1 power pin is
not enough and the effect is the occurance of odds. We can say we
have reached physical borders and we can not cross this borders.

The point is that all functions and timings are running well in
our 80 pin case with 4 power pins and 4 ground pins in combination
with our unique "Synchronous Interface" which is active by using
an 30 MHz clock. Based on this we came to realize that the only
possible way to use the powerful technology our chip design
represents is to use the QFP80 version which is i9914 software
compatible too.

In the moment we recommend the QFP80 version only to get a breakless
working GPIB solution.

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