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Theory Go Straight to SoC
Design Web Training With ARM Cortex-M3
SoC Components:
1. I/O Pads:
For a SoC to be able to interact with the outside world, the least
is needed are input/output pins.
Since these pins also called ports will carry information from
inside the SoC to outside the SoC and vice-versa, these I/O ports
are specially design circuits, which are called I/O pads. The
electrical characteristics of off-chip metal is quite different to
the electrical characteristics of on-chip metal, for example outside
the SoC chip, these I/O pads have to drive very thick metal wires
with very high capacitance, while inside the chip those wires are
very thin.
So we need especially design I/O pads with special circuitry to deal
with harsh outside world and relatively comfortable inside world.
A collection of these I/O pads for a chip is also often termed as
I/O Pad Ring, as usually these pads are arranged in the form of a
Ring around at the periphery of the chip surrounding the 'core'
logic.
Each I/O pad can be either input pad, or an output pad or a
bi-directional pad.
Then Each I/O pad can be either analog pad to carry analog signal or
a digital pad to carry digital signal.
And then there are power pads such as VDD pad and GND (also called
VSS) pad for supplying power to the chip.
ESD Protection:
One of the secondary purpose of the PADs is to protect the internal
chip-circuit from over-voltage pulses. This may be due to
electrostatic charges, or due to human error while accidentally a
user has applied higher than specified voltage to a pin.
Voltage conversion:
Some pads may provide a voltage conversion facility. i.e. they may
be able to translate voltage levels and sort out the difference
between external and internal voltages.
What are pad drivers?
The output pads are required to drive relatively high amount of
currents, as these will connect to off-chip metallic wires, which
may connect to other circuits. For this purpose there are special
purpose circuits designed to provide high current to the output
pads. These are often called pad drivers.
What are GPIOs?
While some pads on the SoC has specific purpose, others can be
general purpose. These general purpose pads are calld GPIOs. They do
not have a defined function as such, but can be very useful to add
functionality to the post-production device. These GPIOs can easily
be made available to the SoC software which can then use it for a
variety of purposes.
I/Os dedicated to DFT:
There is another function associated with the I/O pads. This is to
help with the manufacturing test of the SoC. These pads usually do
not participate in functionality of the SoC, but helps in the
testing of the Chip. So the SoC has some core logic and I/O pads
dedicated to what is called 'Design For Test' Logic or simply DFT
logic. More about DFT is presented in later section(s).
I/Os dedicated to Debug & Trace:
A SoC will have software running on it. To be able to debug the
software, the SoC provides extra logic which helps the software
developers to debug their software.
Then their are SoC I/Os dedicated to this debug enablement. A very
common standard is JTAG, another common standard is SWD (Serial Wire
Debug). Note that both JTAG/SWD can also provide some DFT related
functionality. A JTAG port on the SoC device will have 4-5 I/Os
where as Serial Wire Debug port can reduce the number of SoC level
I/Os to 2.
Pull-up/Pull down functionality associated with I/Os
The I/O pads are often connected to either Ground or VDD inside the
SoC so that they can go to GND voltage or VDD voltage, when they are
not connected to any logic outside the SoC. That means if an I/O is
just kept unconnected or floating outside the SoC, it will attain
either a GND voltage or VDD voltage depending upon if this I/O is
internally connected to GND (via a resistance) or VDD (via a
resistance).
Note that the resistance value will have to be very high, so that
there is minimal current leakage. And also because these values must
easily be overridden when driven by some other source. (i.e. when
they are connected to something rather than left floating). Since
they are easily overridden, and are connected using very high
resistance, these are often called 'weak pull-up' (connected to VDD
via resistance) or 'weak-pull down' (connected to Ground via
resistance)
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