[Coco] 6309

[Dave Philipsen]

You do know that Hitachi did indeed produce a HD6809 also, right? One 
would have to assume that the part number itself (HD6309) was a giveaway 
that something was different.  My guess is that the HD6809 is the true 
second-source for the MC6809 and all of the other 63XX variants were 
there own designs with improvements upon the Motorola designs.  Motorola 
was even a second-source for the 68000 but apparently also designed a 
63000 but possibly never produced them.

Dave


On 3/27/2017 2:53 PM, tim lindner wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at shentel.net> wrote:
>> He did say that they did not get any masks, only permission to do a cmos
>> version clone, so their version was microcoded using their own layout
>> tools. They created a clone of the 6809 per the license, but the opcode
>> map, using their layout tools had some empty slots left. And that was as
>> close as he ever came to saying they "filled in the blanks".  So like
>> everybody else has assumed, the license prevented publicly admitting to
>> an "improved" version.
> I noticed that the HD6300 (Hitachi's 6800 second source part) had
> additional instructions very much like the ones they added to the
> 6309. In the 6300 data manual they were fully documented. Not secret
> at all.
>
> I can imagine (and have no sources to back this up) that Motorola was
> not pleased with this. They still needed a second source the 6809 and
> modified their contract to specifically exclude any changes from the
> spec.
>
> But Hitachi did it anyway.
>