We are using the Aardvark I2C/SPI Host Adapter and Control Center Serial Software to interact with an I2C slave device. Our challenge is the bitrate of the target device is 500 Hz, which is below the bitrate range that the Aardvark adapter supports: 1000 Hz. The details of our setup:

The Control Center Serial Software is a GUI offered by Total Phase that can be used with the Promira Serial Platform, the extremely popular Aardvark I2C/SPI Host Adapter, and the Cheetah SPI Host Adapter to interface with I2C protocol and SPI protocol applications. The software provides easy access to all the I2C and SPI features available in our collection of host adapters and platform tools.

Looking at the data log, I assume the source of this faulty interaction is the host. Otherwise, if it was the USB 2.0 device, I would at least see the IN packet part of the transaction, followed by either an error or a 0 byte DATA0 packet. In other words, during frame 0 (SOF index 4156719), I expect to see an isochronous IN transaction on endpoint 7, but that is missing.

Communication protocols are central to how we understand and develop embedded systems and devices. A communication protocol is a defined system that allows two or more entities in a communications system to talk to each other. Communication protocols define the rules of communication, syntax, semantics, and how the system will recover from errors. Just like humans can communicate with others using different languages, communication protocols facilitate data transfer between hardware, software, or a combination of the two.

FPGAs and ASICs are both types of integrated circuits that are often compared when implementing electronic product design. FPGAs and ASICS are similar in their circuit design flow that consists of arrays of logic cells that can be programmed using hardware description language. However, these two technologies differ in multiple ways, including their purpose and function. In this article, we’ll discuss the differences between FPGAs and ASICs and provide some of the advantages and disadvantages of using each.