Direct GPIO and FIFO Interfaces

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Bypass the Bus for High-Speed I/O

Most of Tensilica's Diamond Standard processors come with innovative ways to bypass the system bus for the fastest possible I/O - a feature available in no other 32-bit processor. As you evaluate Diamond Standard processors, look for 32-bit GPIO (general-purpose I/O) ports and queue interfaces to FIFOs. These innovative interfaces allow I/O performance comparable to the speed designers achieve between blocks on an ASIC design.

GPIO ports are wires that directly connect a Diamond Standard processor to another Diamond or Xtensa processor or external RTL. Diamond Standard processors use two 32-bit GPIOs for high-speed communications.

While GPIOs are ideal to quickly convey control and status information, queues provide a high-speed mechanism to transfer streaming data using a FIFO interface. The data is always available without the need to load or store the data before and after computation.

For example, the Diamond Standard 570T includes both GPIO ports and queues. In the example below, the Diamond 570T is used to decode MP3 audio.

The GPIO ports are used to exchange control signals with the I²S interface logic.

The FIFO queue is used to send the decoded audio stream to the DAC via the I²S interface logic, totally bypassing the bus for high-speed audio.

Designers can interface directly with other RTL blocks through the GPIOs and FIFOs, with no need to go through the processor system interface.