Embedded Peripherals IP User Guide

ID 683130
Date 10/24/2025
Public
Document Table of Contents
1. Introduction 2. Avalon® -ST Serial Peripheral Interface Core 3. SPI Core 4. SPI Agent/JTAG to Avalon® Host Bridge Cores 5. Intel eSPI Agent Core 6. eSPI to LPC Bridge Core 7. Ethernet MDIO Core 8. Intel FPGA 16550 Compatible UART Core 9. UART Core 10. Lightweight 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. EPCS/EPCQA Serial Flash Controller Core 17. Intel FPGA Serial Flash Controller Core 18. Intel FPGA Serial Flash Controller II Core 19. Intel FPGA Generic QUAD SPI Controller Core 20. Intel FPGA Generic QUAD SPI Controller II Core 21. Interval Timer Core 22. Intel FPGA Avalon FIFO Memory Core 23. On-Chip Memory (RAM and ROM) Intel FPGA IP 24. On-Chip Memory II (RAM or ROM) Intel FPGA IP 25. PIO Core 26. PLL Cores 27. DMA Controller Core 28. Modular Scatter-Gather DMA Core 29. Scatter-Gather DMA Controller Core 30. Video Sync Generator and Pixel Converter Cores 31. Intel FPGA Interrupt Latency Counter Core 32. Performance Counter Unit Core 33. Vectored Interrupt Controller Core 34. System ID Peripheral Core 35. Intel FPGA GMII to RGMII Converter Core 36. HPS GMII to RGMII Adapter IP 37. Intel FPGA MII to RMII Converter Core 38. HPS GMII to TSE 1000BASE-X/SGMII PCS Bridge Core IP 39. Intel FPGA HPS EMAC to Multi-rate PHY GMII Adapter Core 40. Intel FPGA MSI to GIC Generator Core 41. Cache Coherency Translator IP 42. Altera ACE5-Lite Cache Coherency Translator

40.1. Core Overview

In the PCI subsystem, Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI) is a feature that enables a device function to request service by writing a system-specified data value to a system-specified message address (using a PCI DWORD memory write transaction). System software initializes the message address and message data during device configuration, allocating one or more system-specified data and system-specified message addresses to each MSI capable function.

A MSI target (receiver), Intel FPGA PCIe RootPort Hard IP, receives MSI interrupts through the Avalon® Streaming ( Avalon® -ST) RX TLP of type MWr. For Avalon® -MM based PCIe RootPort Hard IP, the RP_Master issues a write transaction with the system-specified message data value to the system-specified message address of a MSI TLP received. This memory mapped mechanism does not issue any interrupt output to host the processor; and it relies on the host processor to poll the value changes at the system-specified message address in order to acknowledge the interrupt request and service the MSI interrupt. This polling mechanism may overwhelm the processor cycles and it is not efficient.

The Intel FPGA MSI-to-GIC Generator is introduced with the purpose of allowing level interrupt generation to the host processor upon arrival of a MSI interrupt. It exists as a separate module to Intel FPGA PCIe HIP for completing the interrupt generation to host the processor upon arrival of a MSI TLP.