1. INTRODUCTION
With the proliferation of portable electronic devices, power efficient data transmission has become increasingly important. For serial data transfer, universal asynchronous receiver / transmitter (UART) circuits are often implemented because of their inherent design simplicity and application specific versatility. Components such as laptop keyboards, palm pilot organizers and modems are few examples of devices that employ UART circuits. In this work, design and analysis of a robust UART architecture has been carried out to minimize power consumption during both idle and continuous modes of operation.
UART, an introduction
An UART (universal asynchronous receiver / transmitter) is responsible for performing the main task in serial communications with computers. The device changes incoming parallel information to serial data which can be sent on a communication line. A second UART can be used to receive the information. The UART performs all the tasks, timing, parity checking, etc. needed for the communication. The only extra devices attached are line driver chips capable of transforming the TTL level signals to line voltages and vice versa.
To use the device in different environments, registers are accessible to set or review the communication parameters. Setable parameters are for example the communication speed, the type of parity check, and the way incoming information is signaled to the running software.
UART types
Serial communication on PC compatibles started with the 8250 UART in the XT. In the years after, new family members were introduced like the 8250A and 8250B revisions and the 16450. The last one was first implemented in the AT. The higher bus speed in this computer could not be reached by the 8250 series. The differences between these first UART series were rather minor. The most important property changed with each new release was the maximum allowed speed at the processor bus side.
The 16450 was capable of handling a communication speed of 38.4 kbs without problems. The demand for higher speeds led to the development of newer series which would be able to release the main processor from some of its tasks. The main problem with the original series was the need to perform a software action for each single byte to transmit or receive. To overcome this problem, the 16550 was released which contained two on-board FIFO buffers, each capable of storing 16 bytes. One buffer for incoming, and one buffer for outgoing bytes.
A marvelous idea, but it didn't work out that way. The 16550 chip contained a firmware bug which made it impossible to use the buffers. The 16550A which appeared soon after was the first UART which was able to use its FIFO buffers. This made it possible to increase maximum reliable communication speeds to 115.2 kbs. This speed was necessary to use effectively modems with on-board compression. A further enhancement introduced with the 16550 was the ability to use DMA, direct memory access for the data transfer. Two pins were redefined for this purpose. DMA transfer is not used with most applications. Only special serial I/O boards with a high number of ports contain sometimes the necessary extra circuitry to make this feature work. The 16550A is the most common UART at this moment. Newer versions are under development, including the 16650 which contains two 32 byte FIFO's and on board support for software flow control. Texas Instruments is developing the 16750 which contains 64 byte FIFO's.
(Download Full Report And Abstract)
Download[/size][/color][/url]
