ZX SPI

ZXSPI is a Verilog project to allow the Spectrum with the ZX Breakout (or any other FPGA/CPLD board) to work as an SPI master without all that inelegant bit banging in code.

Features:

• SPI clock from 1.75MHz to some absurdly low frequency (up to 16 stages of division, that would make 26 hertz!)
• Supports CPOL 0 (normal clock polarity) and CPOL 1 (inverted clock polarity)
• Full duplex
• Synchronous design that should work fine with an FPGA
• Requires 70 macrocells (fits an XC9572)

Caveats: I've not done a great deal of Verilog, so it's likely the implementation can be made a bit more efficient. In particular, the parallel to serial and serial to parallel shift registers are double buffered, it's the easiest way of separating the two clock domains (Z80 clock and SPI clock domains), but it's probably possible to do something more convoluted that uses fewer flip flops. I've also not had the opportunity to test SPI reads on real hardware, only on the ISE simulator. It *should* work, but I need to get an SPI device that can be read from to test it.

The Verilog code and Xilinx ISE project file can be obtained here, from WebSVN

Using ZXSPI

The project uses two IO ports, performing full 16 bit port decoding:

• Port 0x043B: SPI read/write
• Port 0x053B: Control and status register.

The control and status register

When writing to the register, the following bits are defined:

bit 7   - not used
bit 6-5 - SPI chip select to use
bit 4-1 - set clock speed
bit 0   - select clock polarity (0 = CPOL 0, 1 = CPOL 1)

After the Spectrum is powered up or reset, the defaults are: Clock speed 1.75MHz, CPOL 0, using chip select 1.

When reading from the register, the following bits are defined:

bit 7   - 1 = Busy, 0 = Ready for a new read/write operation
bit 6-5 - SPI chip select in use
bit 4-1 - Current clock speed
bit 0   - Current clock polarity

Setting SPI clock speed

Bits 4-1 of the control register (0x053B) set the SPI clock speed. The clock speed is determined by a simple 16 stage clock divider. The fastest speed (1.75MHz) is basically the Z80 clock divided by two. So to determine the amount that the 1.75MHz clock is divided by, take the value (0 to 15) and raise to the power of two. Here is a table of the most useful clock speeds:

Bits 4-1   Speed
0          1.75MHz
1          875kHz
2          438kHz
3          219kHz
4          109kHz
5           55kHz
6           27kHz
7           14kHz
8            7kHz
9          3.5kHz

The ludicrously low speeds when the divider is set from 10 to 15 may be helpful while debugging, but probably not for actually running an SPI device!

Chip selects

There are four chip selects, so you can have up to 4 SPI devices. The active chip select is specified by bits 6 and 5 of the control register. The mapping looks like this:

Bit 6   Bit 5   Chip select
  0       0         1
  0       1         2
  1       0         3
  1       1         4

Chip select pins on the ZX Breakout will be 67, 68, 71 and 74 for chip select 1 to 4 in that order.

Writing to an SPI device

After setting the SPI clock to the desired speed, writing is simply a matter of sending the byte you want to send to port 0x043B. If you need to send several bytes, and you know that the 8 bits will be written out on the SPI bus before you send the next byte, you can just write again to port 0x043B. However, if your code is in a tight machine code loop and the SPI clock is a low enough speed, it's likely the SPI write won't have finished. (A future update may be to not transfer the byte into the shift register until the previous byte has been sent so that two may be sent at once, but this is currently not the case). To check whether you can send another byte, read the control and status register and check the state of bit 7. If bit 7 is 1, then it's still busy sending. Once bit 7 goes back low you can send a new byte.

Reading from an SPI device

Reads happen simultaneously to writes. SPI devices don't have an explicit RD or WR signal to specify which one is being done. When you write to an SPI device you get a read for free. If you need to read from a device, but it's not expecting to be written to, then write whatever the device's idle state (for example, 0xFF) is when you write to port 0x043B which will initiate the operation. The data sheet for the SPI device should specify what this is. Once the SPI operation is complete, and the 'busy' bit (bit 7 of the control register) has returned to zero, then reading port 0x043B will return whatever the SPI device deposited on the MISO line.

The same comments about multiple writes in the above section (checking the control register's bit 7) applies to reading too, since they are effectively the same operation.

Default pins

If you don't modify the UCF file in the project, the SPI pins appear on the connector on the right hand side of the board, on the innermost column of pins and the adjacent pins on the top row.

The pin assignments by default are:

61   SPI clock (often known as SCL)
64   MOSI (master out slave in)
66   MISO (master in slave out)
67   Chip select 1 (active low)
68   Chip select 2 (active low)
71   Chip select 3 (active low)
74   Chip select 4 (active low)