Embedded Peripherals IP User Guide

ID 683130
Date 8/11/2025
Public
Document Table of Contents
1. Introduction 2. Avalon® -ST Single-Clock and Dual-Clock FIFO Cores 3. Avalon® -ST Serial Peripheral Interface Core 4. SPI Core 5. SPI Agent/JTAG to Avalon® Host Bridge Cores 6. Intel eSPI Agent Core 7. eSPI to LPC Bridge Core 8. Ethernet MDIO Core 9. Intel FPGA 16550 Compatible UART Core 10. UART Core 11. JTAG UART Core 12. Intel FPGA Avalon® Mailbox Core 13. Intel FPGA Avalon® Mutex Core 14. Intel FPGA Avalon® I2C (Host) Core 15. Intel FPGA I2C Agent to Avalon® -MM Host Bridge Core 16. Intel FPGA Avalon® Compact Flash Core 17. EPCS/EPCQA Serial Flash Controller Core 18. Intel FPGA Serial Flash Controller Core 19. Intel FPGA Serial Flash Controller II Core 20. Intel FPGA Generic QUAD SPI Controller Core 21. Intel FPGA Generic QUAD SPI Controller II Core 22. Interval Timer Core 23. Intel FPGA Avalon FIFO Memory Core 24. On-Chip Memory (RAM and ROM) Intel FPGA IP 25. On-Chip Memory II (RAM or ROM) Intel FPGA IP 26. Optrex 16207 LCD Controller Core 27. PIO Core 28. PLL Cores 29. DMA Controller Core 30. Modular Scatter-Gather DMA Core 31. Scatter-Gather DMA Controller Core 32. SDRAM Controller Core 33. Tri-State SDRAM Core 34. Video Sync Generator and Pixel Converter Cores 35. Intel FPGA Interrupt Latency Counter Core 36. Performance Counter Unit Core 37. Vectored Interrupt Controller Core 38. Avalon® -ST Data Pattern Generator and Checker Cores 39. Avalon® -ST Test Pattern Generator and Checker Cores 40. System ID Peripheral Core 41. Avalon® Packets to Transactions Converter Core 42. Avalon® -ST Multiplexer and Demultiplexer Cores 43. Avalon® -ST Bytes to Packets and Packets to Bytes Converter IP 44. Avalon® -ST Delay Core 45. Avalon® -ST Round Robin Scheduler Core 46. Avalon® -ST Splitter Core 47. Avalon® -MM DDR Memory Half Rate Bridge Core 48. Intel FPGA GMII to RGMII Converter Core 49. HPS GMII to RGMII Adapter Intel® FPGA IP 50. Intel FPGA MII to RMII Converter Core 51. HPS GMII to TSE 1000BASE-X/SGMII PCS Bridge Core Intel® FPGA IP 52. Intel FPGA HPS EMAC to Multi-rate PHY GMII Adapter Core 53. Intel FPGA MSI to GIC Generator Core 54. Cache Coherency Translator Intel® FPGA IP 55. Altera ACE5-Lite Cache Coherency Translator 56. Lightweight UART Core

29.2. Functional Description

You can use the DMA controller to perform data transfers from a source address-space to a destination address-space. The controller has no concept of endianness and does not interpret the payload data. The concept of endianness only applies to a host that interprets payload data.

The source and destination may be either an Avalon® -MM agent peripheral (for example, a constant address) or an address range in memory. The DMA controller can be used in conjunction with peripherals with flow control, which allows data transactions of fixed or variable length. The DMA controller can signal an interrupt request (IRQ) when a DMA transaction completes. A transaction is a sequence of one or more Avalon® transfers initiated by the DMA controller core.

The DMA controller has two Avalon® -MM host ports—a host read port and a host write port—and one Avalon® -MM agent port for controlling the DMA as shown in the figure below.

Figure 105. DMA Controller Block Diagram

A typical DMA transaction proceeds as follows:

  1. A CPU prepares the DMA controller for a transaction by writing to the control port.
  2. The CPU enables the DMA controller. The DMA controller then begins transferring data without additional intervention from the CPU. The DMA’s host read port reads data from the read address, which may be a memory or a peripheral. The host write port writes the data to the destination address, which can also be a memory or peripheral. A shallow FIFO buffers data between the read and write ports.
  3. The DMA transaction ends when a specified number of bytes are transferred (a fixed-length transaction) or an end-of-packet signal is asserted by either the sender or receiver (a variable-length transaction). At the end of the transaction, the DMA controller generates an interrupt request (IRQ) if it was configured by the CPU to do so.
  4. During or after the transaction, the CPU can determine if a transaction is in progress, or if the transaction ended (and how) by examining the DMA controller’s status register.