Abstract

In Medical applications, an analog or digital daughter board need to maintain high throughput point-to-point communication bandwidth with the mother board over a serial or parallel port. Depending on the application scenarios, this application may also need customized protocols.

As systems become more complex and require lower latency, choosing a processor with suitable peripherals becomes challenging. High-speed serial or parallel interfaces are mandatory for many microprocessors or microcontrollers designs, in addition to standard interfaces like, serial peripheral interface (SPI), OSPI, or QSPI. Many of TI’s Sitara™ processors provide the best balance of cost and performance by providing the ability to add additional interfaces or custom protocols with TI’s unique Programmable Real Time Unit (PRU) cores.

TI’s PRU cores provide low latency and no jitter due to its non-pipelined CPU architecture and 1024-bit data bus. TI offers several different types of PRU subsystems: PRUSS (available on AM62x), PRU-ICSS (available on AM335x, AM437x, AM57x, AM263x), and PRU_ICSSG (available on AM243x, AM64x).

This application note discusses how the PRU_ICSSG can be used to implement serial and parallel ports.