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

28.10.1. Setting up Descriptor and mSGDMA Configuration Flow

The following is the recommended software flow to configure descriptor and mSGDMA.
  1. Build the descriptor list and terminate the list with a non-hardware owned descriptor (Owned By Hardware = 0).
  2. Configure mSGDMA by accessing dispatcher core control register (for example: to configure Stop on Error, Stop on Early Termination, etc…)
  3. Configure mSGDMA by accessing the Prefetcher core configuration register (for example: to write the address of the first descriptor in the first list to the next descriptor pointer register and set the Run bit to 1 to initiate transfers).
  4. While the core is processing the first list, your software may build a second list of descriptors.
  5. An IRQ can be generated each time a descriptor transfer is completed (depends whether transfer complete IRQ mask is set for that particular descriptor). If you only need an IRQ to be generated when mSGDMA finishes processing the first list, you only need to set transfer complete IRQ mask for the last descriptor in the first list.
  6. When the last descriptor in the first linked list has been processed, an IRQ will be generated if the descriptor polling is disabled. Following this, your software needs to update the next descriptor pointer register with the address of the first descriptor in the second linked list before setting the run bit back to 1 to resume transfers. If descriptor polling is enabled, software does not need to update the next descriptor pointer register (for second descriptor linked list onwards) and set the run bit back to 1. These 2 steps are automatically done by hardware. The address of the new list is indicated by next descriptor pointer fields of the previous list. The Prefetcher core polls for the Owned by Hardware bit to be 1 in order to resume transfers. Software only needs to flip the Owned by Hardware bit of the first descriptor in second linked list to 1 to indicate to the Prefetcher core that the second linked list is ready.
  7. If there are new descriptors to add, always add them to the list which the core is not processing (indicated by Owned By Hardware = 0). For example, if the core is processing the first list, add new descriptors to the second list and so forth. This method ensures that the descriptors are not updated when the core is processing them. Your software can read the descriptor in the memory to know the status of the transfer (for example, to know the actual bytes being transferred, any error in the transfer).