barnacle wrote:
there's something a bit weird about using a serial interface to, um, talk to a serial interface...
I agree there's some irony there which may be amusing.
But we know irony isn't seriously a factor when deciding how to provide UART capability in a given setting.
The pros and cons of various approaches will differ in importance according to circumstance. For example in a design which needs to be small, or which one intends to overclock, a parallel-interface UART loses points for complicating the address-decode glue, adding capacitance to the bus and increasing its length. In fact there'll be an incentive to de-populate the bus as much as possible (especially if it'll avoid wait states), so one might quite reasonably end up with just a single peripheral on the bus -- a VIA, perhaps -- which, using SPI, manages
multiple I/O devices (not just the UART).
- Jeff
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In 1988 my 65C02 got six new registers and 44 new full-speed instructions!
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