July 30, 2025

Sun 3 bootrom souce - providing power to a 3/160 board

Sun 3 boards are giant VME boards. They have three 96 pin connectors, each with 3 rows of 32 pins.

If you put a sun3 board on a table with the extractor levers and serial connectors to your left, on the right will be P1 farthest away from you (on "top"), P2 in the middle, and P3 on the bottom.

We can supply power to the board through pins on the P1 ("upper") connector. Each row of pins is designated by the letter a, b, or c. Then the pins are numbered top to bottom.

The mating connector I have for P1 is nicely labeled. The "a" row is towards the back of the board and the "c" row is towards the front.

5 volts -- a32, b32, c32
-12 volts -- a31
+12 volts -- c31
Ground -- a9, a11, a15, a17, a19
Ground -- b20, b23
Ground -- c9

Results

I wire up a cable using all three 5 volts pins, the two +-12 pins, and the two pins a9 and c9 for grounds.

I connect a 10 amp supply. No good. The 5 volt supply voltage drops to 2.9 volts. More current is needed.

I get brave and use a 33 amp capable Sorensen DCS33-33E lab supply. I set the voltage to 5.0, check with a meter and fire it up. I have to increase the current limit and it pulls about 12 amps.

But the board does not run. All the DIAG lights come on and stay on. I measure voltage on the board and see 4.4 volts. So I carefully turn up the voltage on the Sorensen to 5.6 volts. Now the board runs and I measure 4.84 volts on the board. It is pulling 12.1 amps.

The Sun Field Engineer manual says that it pulls 15.2 amps of 5 volts.


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Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org