USB Transceiver With a Serial Interface Engine and FIFO Queue for Efficient FPGA-to-FPGA Communication

Abstract

This paper presents a universal serial bus (USB) transceiver with a serial interface engine (SIE) and an asynchronous first-in first-out (FIFO) queue for packet transformation and data transmission in field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-to-FPGA communication. The SIE block receives the data to be transmitted from the central processing unit of a PC and transfers those data to the universal transceiver macrocell interface, which handles data serialization and deserialization, bit stuffing, clock recovery, and clock synchronization. An asynchronous FIFO queue of 2 kilobits is designed to guarantee correct communication between two FPGA development boards. A parallel-in serial-out block converts parallel input data into serial data. A product identification (PID) check block determines whether the serial data are in the USB packet format. The cyclic redundancy check (CRC) checksums, namely CRC5 and CRC16, are presented with data check statements. After passing through the NRZI decoder, bit-unstuffing, PID check, and CRC16 blocks, the received serial data are converted into parallel output data by using a serial-in parallel-out block. The FPGA-to-FPGA communication design operates correctly. An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) of the USB transceiver is implemented using TSMC 0.18-μm CMOS technology. The gate counts, power consumption, operating frequency, and chip area of the ASIC are 14,547, 2.6742 mW, 50 MHz, and 0.7 × 0.67 mm2, respectively, at a supply voltage of 1.8 V and total pin number of 38.

Keywords

• Universal serial bus (USB)
• first-in first-out (FIFO)
• serial interface engine (SIE)
• field-programmable gate array (FPGA)
• application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)
• USB physical layer (PHY)