Peripheral In Microblaze

[wuchy143]

Hi All,

I'm trying to teach myself microblaze and am a little confused as to exactly what a peripheral is. In the tutorial I found online they don't go into too much detail. Bluntly what is a peripheral and how is it used in microblaze.

My guess from what I have read so far is that peripherals are just things that you want to do in your program like...multiply two number and get a result and display it on your computer screen over RS232. But I'm just guessing and would like to have a more confident idea of what they are. Please help.


-mike

 

[BrownOut]

Not quite. Preipherals are custom logic designs that connect to and extend the functinality of the Microblaze processor. They connect to the Microblaze processor via the "onchip peripheral bus" Examples would be serial communications modules, or custom multipliers. The facility to add peripherals allows for customization and extensibility in your Microblaze designs.

 

[wuchy143]

ok. gotcha. so a very simple system could potentially be microblaze which connects up to a UART using the "OPB". So in theory I could connect up Hyperterminal to my dev board shoot an "A" into the UART. Have microblaze do "something" to the "A" data and send it back to Hyperterminal? I think you're the only one that responds to my FPGA stuff Really Thanks. Scraping and crawling is the only way to learn I just signed up to the Xilinx forum as there are many people much like yourself on there.

 

[BrownOut]

That's correct! The UART is one of the "standard" peripherals that is available. FPGA developers is a small comminity, so it'll be just a couple of us discussing these issues.

 

[dknguyen]

You work with FPGAs regularily, Brownout? I didn't know anybody here did.

 

[BrownOut]

Developed systems for about 10 years, mostly in ASIC. The few FPGA projects I've done were pretty simple, or were prototype systems for IP targeted for ASIC. Been out of work for about 10 months, and wanted to go back into FPGA development. Trying to get my FPGA mojo back

 

[wuchy143]

brownout,

Sorry to hear you are out of work At least you have all day to play with FPGA's and master the skills to pay the bills!

So I have been able to get microblaze setup in platform studio. I also took Xilinx's xps_uart16550 and put it in the peripherals list. I then looked at the data sheet for it and think it should work.

I'm a little stuck now. Where do I go from here? Generally what are the next steps so I can program the FPGA and start sending it characters so it can shoot them back to my computer? I"m not looking for you to write me a tutorial but just need some direction. Below is a pic of where I"m at...sadly not very far but it's a start. If I need to struggle some more let me know....I've just been reading tutorials and was on youtube which is just confusing me.

 

[BrownOut]

Honestly, I'm not working with EDK, caues I don't want to pay the $495 subscription fee, and I don't have the time to develop in the 30 days trial period. If I need a processor, I'll just use the picoblaze. Sorry, but you're on a lightly travelled road.

Have you tried this this

EDIT: I was on a great PDF yesterday, but now I can't find my way back to it. I looked at the forums, and thought I was onto something, but it was YOUR thread LOL!

 

[wuchy143]

Great docs. Thanks.

hahahaha yeh. I'm all over the place trying to take in all I can. Xilinx classes are mad expensive and where I work wont pay for it because we would NEVER use FPGA's on a keyboard/trackball. So I"m on my own. You don't need anything much more than an 8051 to scan keys so convincing my boss to throw a spartan chip on there would be a tough task

 

[BrownOut]

I would think Spartan or Coolrunner CPLD would be ideal for keyboard/trackball. But you're doing the right thing; expanding your skill set. The potential of FPGA/CPLD's have yet to be realized. Your efforts will pay off eventually.