March 13, 2013 -- DμART, the newest IP Core mastered by Digital Core Design, is one of the tiniest UART IP Cores available on the market. Small is beautiful, that’s why DCD’s tiny works not only in UART mode, but also implements separate BAUD clock line, false start bit detection, status report and internal diagnostic capabilities.

The DμART is a soft core of a Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART). It can perform both, serial-to-parallel conversion on data characters received from a peripheral device or a modem and parallel-to-serial conversion on data characters received from the CPU. The CPU itself can read the complete status of the UART at any time during the functional operation. Reported status information includes the type and condition of the transfer operations being performed by the UART, as well as any error conditions, like overrun or framing.

The DμART includes also a programmable baud rate generator – says Jacek Hanke, CEO at Digital Core Design -  which is capable of dividing the timing reference clock input by divisors of 1 to (2¹⁶-1) and producing a 16 × clock, for driving the internal transmitter logic. Provisions are also included to use this 16 × clock, to drive the receiver logic. The newest UART Core from Digital Core Design has been also equipped with a processor-interrupt system. Thanks to it, the interrupts can be programmed according to the user's requirements, minimizing the computing required to handle the communications link.

The DμART core is perfect for applications, where the UART and microcontroller are clocked by the same clock signal and are implemented inside the same ASIC or FPGA chip. DCD’s solution is also suitable for a standalone implementation, where several UARTs are required to be implemented inside a single chip and driven by some off-chip devices as well.

More information & data sheet at  http://dcd.pl/ipcore/690/duart/ .