DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF ASYNCHRONOUS FIFO FOR EMBEDDED APPLICATIONS

A FIFO is used as a "First In-First Out" memory buffer between two asynchronous systems with simultaneous write and read access to and from the FIFO, these accesses being independent of one another. Data written into a FIFO is sequentially read out in a pipelined manner, such that the first data written into a FIFO will be the first data read out of the FIFO.

FIFO status flag outputs are a function of the comparison of the respective write and read pointers. A FIFO will always have some status flag outputs; at least a flag that indicates the empty condition and a flag that indicates the full condition.

An asynchronous FIFO refers to a FIFO design where data values are written to a FIFO buffer from one clock domain and the data values are read from the same FIFO buffer from another clock domain, where the two clock domains are asynchronous to each other.

Attempting to synchronize multiple changing signals from one clock domain into a new clock domain and insuring that all changing signals are synchronized to the same clock cycle in the new clock domain has been shown to be challenging. FIFOs are used in designs to safely pass multi-bit data words from one clock domain to another. Data words are placed into a FIFO buffer memory array by control signals in one clock domain, and the data words are removed from another port of the same FIFO buffer memory array by control signals from a second clock domain. Conceptually, the task of designing a FIFO with these assumptions seems to be easy. The difficulty associated with doing FIFO design is related to generating the FIFO pointers and finding a reliable way to determine full and empty status on the FIFO.

In this project, an asynchronous FIFO is designed to pass data between different clock domains using Gray code pointers that are synchronized into a different clock domain before testing for "FIFO full" or "FIFO empty" conditions. The design is coded in VHDL. The functional verification of design is done using ModelSim simulator from Mentor Graphics and Xilinx ISE 9.2i. The applications of FIFO are studied

tan want to download this reference design