SPI Storm Serial Protocol Host Adapter

SPI Storm(TM) is Byte Paradigm's new Serial Protocol Host Adapter controlled from PC through USB interface.

SPI Storm is the World First Dual- and Quad- SPI protocol Host Adapter. SPI Storm also supports standard SPI, SPI protocol on 3 wires and features an advanced protocol definition engine which can be used for setting up virtually any custom (non-standard) serial protocol up to 100 MHz clock operation.

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Why do you need a Serial Protocol Host Adapter?

Serial protocols are everywhere in ASIC, SoC, FPGA and embedded systems. Digital Serial interfaces are often preferred to larger bus-type interfaces for chip-to-chip communication because:

• I/O pins cost money - so it is an advantage to reduce pin count for communications between components.
• Board layout can be hard for large busses, especially as bus frequency increases.
• Higher frequencies are common with today's chip technologies. Higher frequencies compensate reduced pin counts, maintaining total data throughput.
  
  So, there is no surprise that serial protocols similar to SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) or I²C are largely used in numerous off-the-shelf and custom digital components (DAC, ADC, flash memories, ASIC, SoC, FPGA).

When testing and debugging your embedded system, you need to get insight of what is going on in the system.

Similarly, you would want to send custom input stimulus, program registers and parameters.

A Serial Protocol Host Adapter offers all the flexibility you want to do this for serial ports.

Why custom serial protocol definition?

Most chip-to-chip serial protocols look like the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) protocol defined by Motorola. It is illustrated below.
(Click here for an introduction to most common serial protocols)

However, real implementations of serial protocols generate numerous custom protocols due to specific design constraints:

• ASIC designers will want to save on I/O counts and merge MOSI/MISO into a single bi-directional data line.
• Flash chips now often use Dual- and Quad- SPI protocols with multi-purpose I/Os turned into 2 or 4 data lines instead of 1. Of course, this allows increase the total data bandwidth.
• Components like ADCs require some additional control pins to start acquiring data, which is then collected from a standard serial port.
• Additional control pins are often needed when the serial interface is multiplexed with other functionalities on the same I/Os.
• Specific interfaces may require flexible clock on/off control, bi-directional lines, ...