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Serial Interfaces
Serial interfaces are the most commonly used interfaces inside a mobile system. It requires less wiring as well as simple and easy to use, making it the ideal solution for small form factor, size constrained devices such as cellular phones, smartphones, and portable navigation devices. SiliconBlue's iCE65™ mobileFPGA™ devices offered in small form factor packages, with its native low power and low cost architecture are ideal for handheld applications.
Figure 1 - iCE65 mobileFPGA device used to bridge serial interfaces
from an applications processor to different peripheral functions.
I2C Master
I2C or Inter-Integrated Circuit is a popular serial interface protocol that is widely used in almost every handheld device. The I2C interface is a 2-wire interface capable of half duplex serial communication at moderate to high speed of up to few mega bits per second. SiliconBlue's I2C master design example demonstrates how an I2C master can be implemented in an iCE65 mobileFPGA device. The I2C master is capable of controlling multiple I2C slaves such as an I2C slave illumination product (Intersil ISL29002) used for light sensing applications.(See Figure 2).
Figure 2 - iCE65 mobileFPGA device used an I 2C master to control an illumination sensor.
SPI Master
SPI or Serial Peripheral Interface is a serial, synchronous 4-wire communication protocol that is standard across microprocessors, microcontrollers, and peripherals. SiliconBlue offers a design example, which illustrates the implementation of an SPI master using iCE65 mobileFPGA device. It generates all the necessary interfacing signals to give an application processor master control to SPI slaves using a standard microprocessor address/data bus interface. See Figure 3.
Figure 3 - iCE65 mobileFPGA implementing a SPI Master controller enabling a processor to control SPI slaves through a standard data/bus interface.
UART
The UART, or Universal Asynchronous Receiver / Transmitter, is a device used for
communicating serial data (text, numbers, etc.) to / from an Application Processor. The device converts incoming parallel information to serial data which can be sent on a communication line. SiliconBlue offers cost effective UART design example for asynchronous serial data transmission in communication applications.
Figure 4 - iCE65 mobileFPGA used as a Universal Asynchronous Receive and Transmit tranceiver.
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