I/O Model

IO Approach

Devices which do not require high bandwidths or don't need to work autonomously on a large data set can be integrated via direct connection to the data and address bus of the SpartanMC. Therefore, the data access in the EX/MEM pipeline stage uses the computed address to select either the memory blocks or for a different address region the memory mapped peripherals.
Each of the peripherals has a select signal as an input and detects its own subaddress space. Registers in the peripherals should be synchronized to the processor clock.
The output data (in case of read instructions) of all peripherals is combined with a distributed multiplexer. Each of the peripherals produces a zero on its outputs if it is not accessed. Now all outputs can be combined with a large Or gate (using the fast carry chains of the FPGA).

Schematic of the SpartanMC IO Model integration

IO-Model
The SpartanMC core provides a dedicated interface for IO modules. It includes a 10 bit address bus for the peripheral address space. This peripheral bus is created from the 18 bit address bus via a core internal address decoder.