Finally, after weeks* of effort I can write about the SPI interface between the Atmel SAM4S supervisor chip and the support CPU in the FPGA. You’ll recall from my last post that I had this working in emulation, but anyone who has worked on FPGAs or RTL code before, a simulation is still a long way from a working configuration. Still, after a bit of work, I managed to get this:

I managed to reliably pass the string ‘ABCD’ (0x41 0x42 0x43 0x44 in hex) across the SPI interface in response to a keypress going from the picocom terminal through the USB serial port of the supervisor chip, passed through the SPI module of the Atmel SAM chip into the FPGA across 4 lines of control and signal, into the soft Z80 CPU. Responding to the incoming data, the software stored in the ‘ROM’ in the supervisor functions would read the transmitted keypress, store it in memory and return ‘ABCD’ across the SPI interface by requesting another transfer from the master. Continue reading →