SPI Master & Slave Interface in VHDL

SPI Master & Slave Interface in VHDL

Details

Category: Communication Controller

Created: May 16, 2011

Updated: January 27, 2020

Language: VHDL

Other project properties

Development Status: Stable

Additional info: ASIC proven, Design done, FPGA proven, Specification done

WishBone compliant: No

WishBone version: n/a

License: LGPL

Description

This project started from the need to have robust yet simple SPI interface cores written in VHDL to use in generic FPGA-to-device interfacing.
The resulting cores generate small and efficient circuits, that operate from very slow SPI clocks up to over 50MHz SPI clocks.

The project contains 2 independent cores: SPI_MASTER and SPI_SLAVE.
Both cores are written in VHDL, with fully pipelined RTL architecture and separate clock domains for the SPI bus clock and parallel I/O interface.

The design is originally targeted to a Spartan-6 device, but is written in fully synthesizable, technology-independent VHDL.
The circuits preserve FPGA clock resources by directly using the system high speed clock for all flops, with clock enables (CE) to clock registers.
The master and slave cores were verified in hardware using the Digilent Atlys board (Spartan-6 @100MHz) with spi clocks from 500kHz to 50MHz SPI clock, with perfect phasing and very robust operation.

If you find these cores useful, please let me know: jdoin@opencores.org

If you find the LGPL license to be unfit for your purposes, please let me know and we can change the license for another open-source hardware license that can be integrated in your application.
 

Features

- VHDL core, fully synchronous, designed with classic RTL pipelined architecture, with a single high-speed global clock
- Very small and efficient SPI interface
- Parameterizable at instantiation by generics: (N, CPOL, CPHA, PREFETCH, SPI_2X_CLK_DIV)
-> SPI modes (CPOL, CPHA): supports modes 0,1,2,3
-> Word width (N): from 8 bits to synthesis limit (accepts any word length)
-> Lookahead input data request (PREFETCH): pipelined data request for back-to-back data transmission
-> SPI 2x clock divider value from the high-speed system clock
- Very economic: no FIFO, just a registered parallel output buffer for received data
- Parallel read/write similar to synchronous RAM ports
- Independent clock domains for the serial bus and parallel read/write ports with async domain transfer pipelines
- Can be used to control generic SPI devices (master), or as interface to MCUs (slave)
- Vendor-independent, fully LUT/FF design, uses no Xilinx-specific structures, IOBs or shift registers
- Synthesizes to +210MHz in a Spartan-6 lowest grade, using only CLB logic
- Verified in silicon, with a 100MHz clock, using SPI frequencies from 500kHz up to 50MHz in a Spartan-6 XC6SLX45-2
- Very small: 41 slices for 2 ports (a master interface + a slave interface) with 32bits of word length