Section A.2. Peripherals and Memory Controllers

A.2. Peripherals and Memory Controllers

To facilitate FPGA embedded processor design, both Xilinx and Altera offer extensive libraries of intellectual property (IP) in the form of peripherals and memory controllers. This IP is included in the embedded processor toolsets provided by these manufacturers. To emphasize the versatility and flexibility afforded the embedded designer using an FPGA, the following is a partial list of IP included with the embedded processor design tools from Altera and Xilinx:

Peripheral Types

• General-purpose I/O

• UART

• Timer

• Debug

• SPI

• DMA controller

• Ethernet (interface to external MAC/PHY chip)

Memory Controllers

• SRAM

• Flash

• SDRAM

• DDR SDRAM (Xilinx only)

• CompactFlash