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

4.2. Functional Description

Figure 11. System with an SPI Agent to Avalon® Host Bridge Core
Figure 12. System with a JTAG to Avalon® Host Bridge Core
Note: System clock must be at least 2X faster than the JTAG clock.

The SPI Agent to Avalon® Host Bridge and the JTAG to Avalon® Host Bridge cores accept encoded streams of bytes with transaction data on their respective physical interfaces and initiate Avalon® memory-mapped interface transactions on their Avalon® memory-mapped interfaces. Each bridge consists of the following cores, which are available as standalone components in Platform Designer (except the JTAG to Avalon® Streaming Interface Block):

  • Avalon® Streaming Interface Serial Peripheral Interface—Accepts incoming data in bits and packs them into bytes.
  • JTAG to Avalon® Streaming Interface Block—Custom block that accepts incoming data in bits and packs them into bytes.
  • Avalon® Streaming Interface Bytes to Packets Converter—Transforms packets into encoded stream of bytes, and a likewise encoded stream of bytes into packets.
  • Avalon® Streaming Interface Packets to Transactions Converter—Transforms packets with data encoded according to a specific protocol into Avalon® memory-mapped interface transactions, and encodes the responses into packets using the same protocol.
  • Avalon® Streaming Interface Single Clock FIFO—Buffers data from the Avalon® Streaming Interface JTAG Interface core. The FIFO is only used in the JTAG to Avalon® Host Bridge.

    For the bridges to successfully transform the incoming streams of bytes to Avalon® memory-mapped interface transactions, the streams of bytes must be constructed according to the protocols used by the cores.

Note: When you connect the JTAG Avalon® Host Bridge component to an agent that back-pressures the host interface on this component, then using the System Console master_write_from_file command may result in data loss at the host interface or hung command in System Console.
Figure 13. Bits to Avalon® memory-mapped interface Transaction (Write)The following example shows how a bytestream changes as it is transferred through the different layers in the bridges for write transaction.
Figure 14. Write ResponseAfter sending a write transaction packet through MOSI bus, the host has to initiate 8 bytes of IDLE transaction on the MOSI bus in order to get the write response from the MISO bus. The following figure shows the write response transaction that constructed by the bridge in the MISO bus. The most significant bit of the command is inversed.
Figure 15. Bits to Avalon® memory-mapped interface Transaction (Read)The following figure shows how a bytestream changes as it is transferred through the different layers in the bridges for a read transaction.
Figure 16. Read ResponseAfter sending a read transaction through MOSI bus, the host has to initiate IDLE transaction on the MOSI bus to get the read response from the MISO bus. There is a possibility that the Avalon agent device is yet to return the read data, therefore the bridge returns 0x4A until read data is received. When read data is received by the bridge, it sends channel byte as the first byte followed by the SOP and data byte. The following figure shows the read response transaction that constructed by the bridge in the MISO bus.