Legacy Digital I/O Interfacing Standards

Chapter 12 describes several of the common I/O standards that are likely to be encountered in FPGA systems. Parallel, RS232 serial, SPI, and I2C standards and interfacing are discussed.

Historically, several common digital interface standards have developed over the years to interface computers to their peripheral devices. This chapter will introduce several of the older standards and briefly describe how they function in a hardware design. Each standard has a unique set of hardware and performance tradeoffs. Many devices and ICs are available that use these standards. These interfaces are present in most PCs and are found in many embedded systems including FPGA boards.