The 8088 Pinouts IF YOURE NEW TO SIXTEEN-BIT STUFF, THE FIRST THING THAT SHOULD CROSS YOUR

MIND Is how in the world do you get a 1 meg address space into a standard 40-pin dip? An off the Cuff answer would be that you do it with mirrors and if you carefully examine the pinouts of the 8088, youll see thats not far from the truth since several of the pins do double duty. Remember that being able to directly talk to a megabyte of memory means the 8088 needs 20 address outputs, A0 through A19. When you add that to the 8 data pins, power, ground, and the miscellaneous control signals, youre going to rapidly run out of available pins. As you can see from fig. 3-1, intels solution to this problem is to let two signals time share the same physical pin. The 8088 pins can be grouped into three basic categories 1. Address and data 2. Power and timing 3. Control As we take a look at each group of pins, youll begin to understand the differences and similarities between this microprocessor and all of its eight-bit ancestors. ADDRESS PIN When you talk about the address outputs, you also have to talk about the data pins Since the data is time multiplexed on the lower eight address pins, A0 through A7. Pin sharing is nothing new. If youre familiar with the Z-80, for example, youll probably remenber that the refresh counter for dynamic memory appears on the lower part of the address bus while the CPU is busy elsewhere doing instruction decoding. Even intels own 8085 combined the address and data lines. Now, time sharing pins is a good way to pack more features into a chip well see that it makes the 8088 extremely powerful. But remember the third law of life and design: THERES NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH The price you pay for 8088s enhanced functions is an increase in the size of the headache youll get when you desing around it. You need decoders and latches to grab the appropriate information from the chip at the right time. Besides having to be careful about the system timing, it also means you have to plan on some extra silicon overhead when youre laying out your circuit. All the miscellaneous logic we have to add to demultiplex the signals is stuff that really belongs inside the CPU itself. its anyones guess as to why intel went this route. They had done the same

thing with the 8085, (their super-duper 8088) and it gotten a somewhat less than enthusiastic response from most of the industry. Of course, by the time they finally got around to introducing it, Zilogs Z-80 had already been around for three years and was the overwhelming chip of choice for 8088 type applications. The 8088 (and 8086) are really sixteen-bit versions of the eigth-bit 8055-as we get into the 8088 well see that even the internal architecture is similar. As a matter of fact, software written for the 8085 can be modified to run on the 8088 with an absolute minimum of brain damage. For whatever its worth, theres no doubt in my mind that if IBM hadnt decided to use intel stuff for their PCs intel wouldnt be as big a company as they are now. It takes more than just a good microprocessor to make a silicon superstarit has to be used in a major application. But were getting way ahead of ourselves. The address pins on the 8088 are functionally divided into three groupsAD0 through AD7, A8 through A15, and A16 through A19. The reason for breaking them up like this is that not all of them carry the address all the time. Just about the only two things they have in common are that their portion of the address is valid during the beginning of each instruction cycle and the lines float when some other device takes control of the bus. Well take a closer look at this when we talk about the control signals. The first group, AD0 through AD7, is the most versatile. During the first part of an instruction cycle, (well get into timing in a bit), the 8088 puts the least significant part of the address, (the lower eight bits), on these pins. As soon as the CPU gets to the second part of the instructions cycle, it removes the address from these lines and floats them (tristated) to get them ready for their next job. When the 8088 reaches the third part of its instruction cycle, it uses these pins as the data lines. Since data has to be able to go two ways, these pins become bidirectional during this stage of the instruction cycle. The second group of address pins, A8 through A15, are a set of plain vainilla address pins and the portion of the complete address they carry stays valid for the entire instructions cycle. The final address pins, A14 through A19, are what the 8088 a sixteen-bit CPU since theyre the addresses from 10000h, (thats a decimal 65.536), to FFFFFh, (or decimal 1,048,575).These lines carry valid address data at the same time as the first group of address lines, (the beginning of each instructions cycle), and then carry status signals which indicate the address segment currently in use, (S3 and S4), the state of the interrupt enable flag, (S5) and a flag to indicate that the 8088 has control of the bus (S6).