protocol for inter-CPU communications

Thread Starter

dbertels

Joined Nov 10, 2008
2
We are designing an instrument that contains 3 Processors: 2 MSP430s and one FPGA TSK3000. It also has a USB chip. I am currently researching a means for these processors to communicate with each other (full duplex).

I'm talking higher level communication here - some protocol written in C. All I can come up with is using something like a mini TCP/IP stack, like uIP. This would be at the cost of a lot of overhead.
Maybe someone can direct me to some known communication protocols that can do the trick?
 
Last edited:

beenthere

Joined Apr 20, 2004
15,819
Speaking in general, one uC has numbers that the other needs. Can you place a serial memory IC in the system as a scratchpad for them to use to swap values? You would have to work out some signalling protocol to indicate if there was new data present, but that might be simpler than actually setting up full-scale intercomputer channels.
 

Thread Starter

dbertels

Joined Nov 10, 2008
2
Thanks for your reply - it is a good idea, but we don't have shared memory. So we decided on designing our own protocol - which should turn out much more efficient. Just was hoping that there may have been some free C code around that implements a protocol for this purpose.
 
Thanks for your reply - it is a good idea, but we don't have shared memory. So we decided on designing our own protocol - which should turn out much more efficient. Just was hoping that there may have been some free C code around that implements a protocol for this purpose.

Hi there,
I have used the AMBA (AHB and APB) protocol which is availble from ARM. We developed a HDL (Hardware) implementation of it for connecting a CPU to a video hardware co-processor. There is a similar open-source version called wishbone which is availble on opencores.org
 
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