Owner's manual

27-6 DS785UM1
Copyright 2007 Cirrus Logic
IDE Interface
EP93xx User’s Guide
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Machine sees that the incoming versus outgoing data rate is out of balance, it will signal the
controlling device to pause the transfer. For both read and write operations it is expected that
the DMA controller will get behind and not be able to keep up with the device transfer rate.
Thus the net transfer rate is determined by the available DMA controller bandwidth and how
fast the DMA completion is acknowledged by interrupt or by reading some DMA transfer
counters. The DMA controller does a DMA data transfer by:
• Requesting the AHB
• Reading the source data to a local buffer
• Requests the AHB for the write to the destination.
No burst transfer is allowed.
27.2.6 UDMA Example
For an estimation of the speed of operation, consider a UDMA read operation. After being
granted master status on the AHB bus, the DMA controller access to the IDEUDMADataIn
register will complete in 2 AHB clock cycles. Typical data transfers are to system dynamic
memory through the SDRAM controller. Single cycle writes to SDRAM get posted and are
completed in 2 AHB cycles, provided that the SDRAM controller is not busy. Consecutive
SDRAM single transfer writes will take 8 AHB cycles. If we assume one clock cycle for bus
arbitration, we end up with a maximum sustained DMA transfer rate of one 32-bit transfer
every 11 AHB clocks. For a 100 MHz AHB (10 ns cycle time), and two 16-bit IDE transfers
per DMA transfer, this example works out to 55 ns per IDE transfer peak rate.
A more typical DMA exists when the DMA request conflicts with ARM Core cache line fills or
raster display memory access. Cache line fills use quad word bursts and raster accesses use
16 word bursts. The worst case is the raster, which will hold the SDRAM controller for 20 AHB
clocks. Assuming a worst case system load where raster is getting 50% of the memory
bandwidth, and each raster burst in between is a cache line fill, the DMA controller can only
get 12 of the 40 available clocks. In this case, the DMA write would get posted, and flushed,
but a read would use 8 of the 12 cycles. Either case would be able to complete one DMA
transfer every 40 AHB clocks. The IDE transfer rate for this example is 400 ns per DMA
transfer, which is 200 ns per IDE transfer. This still nets 10 megabytes per second (MBps) in
a heavily loaded system.
In this last example, the DMA controller would not keep up with the IDE device and the
transfers would rely on proper signaling to pause the IDE transfers until the DMA catches up.
An additional overhead would be how fast the DMA controller is configured to do another
DMA transfer after finishing one. There might be the possibility that the request line has been
pulled high even before the DMA controller is set to service this request after the completion
of the previous request is acknowledged.
The device operates asynchronously to the host and all input signals to the host are
synchronized to the AHB clock. In a UDMA read operation, there is a possibility that the
device is transmitting the data and toggling DSTROBE too quickly for the host to keep up with
latching the data from DD bus, based on the synchronized version of DSTROBE. There is a
lower limit for AHB clock speed, where lowering the speed further cannot guarantee correct