FM33256B
Document Number: 001-86213 Rev. *C
Page 23 of 39
Serial Peripheral Interface – SPI Bus
The FM33256B employs a serial peripheral interface (SPI) bus.
It is specified to operate at speeds up to 16 MHz. This high-speed
serial bus provides high-performance serial communication to an
SPI master. Many common microcontrollers have hardware SPI
ports allowing a direct interface. It is quite simple to emulate the
port using ordinary port pins for microcontrollers that do not. The
FM33256B operates in SPI Mode 0 and 3.
SPI Overview
The SPI is a four-pin interface with Chip Select (CS), Serial Input
(SI), Serial Output (SO), and Serial Clock (SCK) pins.
The SPI is a synchronous serial interface, which uses clock and
data pins for memory access and supports multiple devices on
the data bus. A device on the SPI bus is activated using the CS
pin.
The relationship between chip select, clock, and data is dictated
by the SPI mode. This device supports SPI modes 0 and 3. In
both of these modes, data is clocked into the F-RAM on the rising
edge of SCK starting from the first rising edge after CS goes
active.
The SPI protocol is controlled by opcodes. These opcodes
specify the commands from the bus master to the slave device.
After CS is activated, the first byte transferred from the bus
master is the opcode. Following the opcode, any addresses and
data are then transferred. The CS must go inactive after an
operation is complete and before a new opcode can be issued.
The commonly used terms in the SPI protocol are as follows:
SPI Master
The SPI master device controls the operations on an SPI bus.
An SPI bus may have only one master with one or more slave
devices. All the slaves share the same SPI bus lines and the
master may select any of the slave devices using the CS pin. All
of the operations must be initiated by the master activating a
slave device by pulling the CS pin of the slave LOW. The master
also generates the SCK and all the data transmission on SI and
SO lines are synchronized with this clock.
SPI Slave
The SPI slave device is activated by the master through the Chip
Select line. A slave device gets the SCK as an input from the SPI
master and all the communication is synchronized with this
clock. An SPI slave never initiates a communication on the SPI
bus and acts only on the instruction from the master.
The FM33256B operates as an SPI slave and may share the SPI
bus with other SPI slave devices.
Chip Select (CS)
To select any slave device, the master needs to pull down the
corresponding CS pin. Any instruction can be issued to a slave
device only while the CS pin is LOW. When the device is not
selected, data through the SI pin is ignored and the serial output
pin (SO) remains in a high-impedance state.
Note
A new instruction must begin with the falling edge of CS.
Therefore, only one opcode can be issued for each active Chip
Select cycle.
Serial Clock (SCK)
The Serial Clock is generated by the SPI master and the
communication is synchronized with this clock after CS goes
LOW.
The FM33256B enables SPI modes 0 and 3 for data
communication. In both of these modes, the inputs are latched
by the slave device on the rising edge of SCK and outputs are
issued on the falling edge. Therefore, the first rising edge of SCK
signifies the arrival of the first bit (MSB) of an SPI instruction on
the SI pin. Further, all data inputs and outputs are synchronized
with SCK.
Data Transmission (SI/SO)
The SPI data bus consists of two lines, SI and SO, for serial data
communication. SI is also referred to as Master Out Slave In
(MOSI) and SO is referred to as Master In Slave Out (MISO). The
master issues instructions to the slave through the SI pin, while
the slave responds through the SO pin. Multiple slave devices
may share the SI and SO lines as described earlier.
The FM33256B has two separate pins for SI and SO, which can
be connected with the master as shown in
Figure 13
.
For a microcontroller that has no dedicated SPI bus, a
general-purpose port may be used. To reduce hardware
resources on the controller, it is possible to connect the two data
pins (SI, SO) together.
Figure 14
shows such a configuration,
which uses only three pins.
Most Significant Bit (MSB)
The SPI protocol requires that the first bit to be transmitted is the
Most Significant Bit (MSB). This is valid for both address and
data transmission.
The 256-Kbit serial F-RAM requires a 2-byte address for any
read or write operation. Because the address is only 15 bits, the
upper bit which is fed in is ignored by the device. Although this
bit is ‘don’t care’, Cypress recommends that this bit be set to ‘0’
to enable seamless transition to higher memory densities.
Serial Opcode
After the slave device is selected with CS going LOW, the first
byte received is treated as the opcode for the intended operation.
FM33256B uses the standard opcodes for memory accesses.
Invalid Opcode
If an invalid opcode is received, the opcode is ignored and the
device ignores any additional serial data on the SI pin until the
next falling edge of CS, and the SO pin remains tristated.
