For communication with external devices (e.g. host PCs) the SpartanMC SoC-Kit provides an Universal Asynchronous Reseiver Transmitter (UART) interface.

The Complex UART peripheral allows the configuration of frame length and baud rate at runtime. The depth of the input and output FIFO bufferes is configurable via module parameters.

The Simple UART peripheral provides a very small resource footprint but uses a fixed frame length configuration. The depth of the input and output FIFO bufferes and the baud rate is configurable via module parameters.

The two wire I²C bus can be instantiated as master or as slave module (slave currently not tested).

General information about I²C can be found under:

http://www.sprut.de/electronic/pic/grund/i2c.htm (gr)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IIC

For communication using the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI)-bus we provide an SPI master peripheral which can be connected with up to 15 SPI-slaves.

General information about SPI can be found under:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/spi

The SpartanMC timer bases upon an 18 bit counter. The input clock can be take from different sources e.g. external clock, DCM or another timer and can be devided by a configurable prescaler.

In combination with the timer module it is possible to generate an arbitrary number of RTI-, Watchdog-, Capture-, Compare- und Pulse Accumulator modules.

Note: Some timer components e.g. the capture or compare module are not stand alone peripherals. They always require a basic timer as input source. Other timer components e.g. the Pulse Accumulator Module could work autonomously an an exteranl input source.

For the SpartanMC there are three types of digital IO-Modules availible: input-, output- and bidirectional-ports (PortIn-, PortOut-, PortBi-Module). Each of that port modules provides up to 18 IO lines. The trigger condition of input signals can be configured at runtime.

The SpartanMC interrupt controller supports 18 interrupt signals and propegates the interrupt with the highest priority to the CPU.

The interrupt controller is available in two versions. The first version can not be interrupted during interrupt execution by a pending interrupt of higher priority (Simple Interrupt Controller). The second version is interruptable with the drawback of higher hardware effort (Complex Interrupt Controller).