The 8085A is a complete 8 bit parallel central processor. It requires a single +5 volt supply. Its basic clock speed is 3 MHz thus improving on the present 8080's performance with higher system speed. Also it is designed to fit into a minimum system of three IC's: The CPU, a RAM/ IO, and a ROM or PROM/IO chip.
The 8085A uses a multiplexed Data Bus. The address is split between the higher 8bit Address Bus and the lower 8bit Address/Data Bus. During the first cycle the address is sent out. The lower 8bits are latched into the peripherals by the Address Latch Enable (ALE). During the rest of the machine cycle the Data Bus is used for memory or l/O data.
The 8085A provides RD, WR, and lO/Memory signals for bus control. An Interrupt Acknowledge signal (INTA) is also provided. Hold, Ready, and all Interrupts are synchronized. The 8085A also provides serial input data (SID) and serial output data (SOD) lines for simple serial interface. In addition to these features, the 8085A has three maskable, restart interrupts and one non-maskable trap interrupt. The 8085A provides RD, WR and IO/M signals for Bus control.
Status Information
Status information is directly available from the 8085A. ALE serves as a status strobe. The status is partially encoded, and provides the user with advanced timing of the type of bus transfer being done. IO/M cycle status signal is provided directly also. Decoded So, S1 Carries the following status information:
HALT, WRITE, READ, FETCH
S1 can be interpreted as R/W in all bus transfers. In the 8085A the 8 LSB of address are multiplexed with the data instead of status. The ALE line is used as a strobe to enter the lower half of the address into the memory or peripheral address latch. This also frees extra pins for expanded interrupt capability.
Interrupt and Serial l/O
The8085A has5 interrupt inputs: INTR, RST5.5, RST6.5, RST 7.5, and TRAP. INTR is identical in function to the 8080 INT. Each of the three RESTART inputs, 5.5, 6.5. 7.5, has a programmable mask. TRAP is also a RESTART interrupt except it is nonmaskable. The three RESTART interrupts cause the internal execution of RST (saving the program counter in the stack and branching to the RESTART address) if the interrupts are enabled and if the interrupt mask is not set. The non-maskable TRAP causes the internal execution of a RST independent of the state of the interrupt enable or masks.
The interrupts are arranged in a fixed priority that determines which interrupt is to be recognized if more than one is pending as follows: TRAP highest priority, RST 7.5, RST 6.5, RST 5.5, INTR lowest priority This priority scheme does not take into account the priority of a routine that was started by a higher priority interrupt. RST 5.5 can interrupt a RST 7.5 routine if the interrupts were re-enabled before the end of the RST 7.5 routine. The TRAP interrupt is useful for catastrophic errors such as power failure or bus error. The TRAP input is recognized just as any other interrupt but has the highest priority. It is not affected by any flag or mask. The TRAP input is
both edge and level sensitive.