Europe Card Bus

The Europe Card Bus (ECB or ECB-bus) is a computer bus developed in 1977 by the company Kontron, mainly for the 8-bit Zilog Z80, Intel 8080 and Intel 8085 microprocessor families.

Mechanically, the ECB is usually implemented as a backplane circuit board installed in a 19-inch rack chassis. ECB cards have 3U Eurocard format (100 mm × 160 mm).

Use two or three-row versions of DIN 41612 connectors, 0.1" pitch. Original Kontron ECB, supported 64 pins, using "a" and "c" rows, ”b” row tied to "C' row. ECB boards are NOT compatible with STEbus or VMEbus P2 connector (while STEbus does not use the “b” column; VME does define specific signals on the ‘b’ row).

Active low signals indicated by asterisk.

GND: Ground reference voltage

+5V: Powers most logic.

+12V; -12V: +15V; -15V Legacy power inputs, primarily useful for RS232 buffer power or ADU. The +12V used for programming voltage generators. Both can be used in analogue circuitry, but note that these are primarily power rails for digital circuitry, so decoupling or local regulation is recommended for analogue circuitry.

+5VBat: Standby voltage. Optional. This line is reserved for carrying a battery backup voltage to boards that supply or consume it. NiCad batteries are common source. The ECBbus spec is not rigid about where this should be sourced from. In practice, this means that most boards requiring backup power tend to play safe and have a battery on board, often with a link to allow it to supply or accept power from +5VBat . You can end up with more batteries in your system than you need, so care must be taken that no more than one battery is driving the +5VBat line.

D0...7: Data bus. This is only 8-bits wide, but most I/O or memory-mapped peripherals are byte-oriented.

A0...19: Address bus. This allows up to 1 MByte of memory to be addressed. Current technology is such that processor requiring large amounts of memory has this on the processor board, so this is not a great limitation. I/O space is limited to 4K, to simplify I/O address decoding to a practical level. A 74LS688 can decode A11...4 to locate I/O slave boards at 16-byte boundaries.

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