Building a mother board [Archive]

shine

02-08-2000, 10:50 AM

Does any one know where I can go to find out the exact name and number of chips, capacitors, resistors and other electronic part I would to build a motherboard from scratch. Or if anyone has done it in the past could you give me advise on the project.
I am just doing the project to learn more about the inner workings of a computer. I will be doing it with a group of friends and we have all assembled computers before and have basic knowledge of electronic circuits.

Paul V

02-08-2000, 11:59 AM

I was actually talking to a group of people on this before. The big problem is running all the traces on the board. It would take many many many hours to do by hand, so unless you have an automated way of doing it, you'd have problems.

The best way, if you wanted to proceed, would be to simply copy an existing board. You can trace out all the traces, from that you can do a schematic if need be.

Board design by hand is rough stuff. if you want to proceed do keep me posted by email -- I've done my share of assembly and HW design, so I can probably help you to some degree.

If you want a custom system, then you need to completely design a computer architecture from the ground up. How many CPUs do you want? You will probably not want the overbloated x86 type CPUs, but will want something that uses a RISC architecture.

Then you need to figure out how you want to handle the MB architecture. You will need to program a BIOS for yourself, and you will need to implement PCI 2.1 and ISA buses, and AGP if you can do it. Overall this could take a long time to do.

As to how many resistors, caps, etc. you need -- the question is how many DO you need? However many you have to put on your board to make it work, however many you need in your schematics. There's no right or wrong way (although there are smart and not-so-smart ways)

This probably is not the right forum for this post though?

[This message has been edited by Paul V (edited 02-08-2000).]