Gtkwave notes

General Gtkwave is a simple and convenient viewer of electronic waveforms. It’s a free software tool at its best: A bit rough to start working with, but after a while it becomes clear that the decisions have been made by someone who uses the tool himself. Really recommended. So here are my jumpstart notes for [...]

Notes on USB 1.1 low-level protocol for FPGA implementation

Introduction These are the consideration and design decisions I took when designing a transparent hub for low- and full-speed USB (that is, all covered by USB 1.1, and not high-speed as required by USB 2.0). A transparent 1:1 hub is a device with one male USB plug, and one female plug. It basically substitutes an [...]

NXP / Freescale SDMA and the art of accessing peripheral registers

Preface While writing a custom SDMA script for copying data arriving from an eCSPI peripheral into memory, it occurred to me that there is more than one way to fetch the data from the peripheral. This post summarizes my rather decisive finding in this matter. Spoiler: Linux’ driver could have done better (Freescale’s v4.1.15) I’ve [...]

NXP / Freescale i.MX6 as an SPI slave

Motivation Even though SPI is commonly used for controlling rather low-speed peripherals on an embedded system, it can also come handy for communicating data with an FPGA. When using the official Linux driver, the host can only be the SPI master. It means, among others, that transactions are initiated by the host: When the bursts [...]