ESP SPI Slave HD (Half Duplex) Mode Protocol¶
Note
This protocol is only for ESP32-S2. The driver for other chip versions hasn’t be developed yet.
SPI Slave Capabilities of Espressif chips¶
ESP32 |
ESP32-S2 |
|
|---|---|---|
SPI Slave HD |
N |
Y (v2) |
Tohost intr |
N |
|
Frhost intr |
2 * |
|
TX DMA |
Y |
|
RX DMA |
Y |
|
Shared registers |
72 |
Introduction¶
In the half duplex mode, the master has to use the protocol defined by the slave to communicate with the slave. Each transaction may consists of the following phases (list by the order they should exist):
Command: 8-bit, master to slave
This phase determines the rest phases of the transactions. See Supported Commands.
Address: 8-bit, master to slave, optional
For some commands (WRBUF, RDBUF), this phase specifies the address of shared buffer to write to/read from. For other commands with this phase, they are meaningless, but still have to exist in the transaction.
Dummy: 8-bit, floating, optional
This phase is the turn around time between the master and the slave on the bus, and also provides enough time for the slave to prepare the data to send to master.
Data: variable length, the direction is also determined by the command.
This may be a data OUT phase, in which the direction is slave to master, or a data IN phase, in which the direction is master to slave.
The direction means which side (master or slave) controls the MOSI, MISO, WP and HD pins.
Data IO Modes¶
In some IO modes, more data wires can be use to send the data. As a result, the SPI clock cycles required for the same amount of data will be less than in 1-bit mode. For example, in QIO mode, address and data (IN and OUT) should be sent on all 4 data wires (MOSI, MISO, WP, and HD). Here’s the modes supported by ESP32-S2 SPI slave and the wire number used in corresponding modes.
Mode |
command WN |
address WN |
dummy cycles |
data WN |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1-bit |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
DOUT |
1 |
1 |
4 |
2 |
DIO |
1 |
2 |
4 |
2 |
QOUT |
1 |
1 |
4 |
4 |
QIO |
1 |
4 |
4 |
4 |
QPI |
4 |
4 |
4 |
4 |
Normally, which mode is used is determined is determined by the command sent by the master (See Supported Commands), except from the QPI mode.
QPI Mode¶
The QPI mode is a special state of the SPI Slave. The master can send ENQPI command to put the slave into the QPI mode state. In the QPI mode, the command is also sent in 4-bit, thus it’s not compatible with the normal modes. The master should only send QPI commands when the slave is in the QPI mode. To exit form the QPI mode, master can send EXQPI command.
Supported Commands¶
Note
The command name are in a master-oriented direction. For example, WRBUF means master writes the buffer of slave.
Name |
Description |
Command |
Address |
Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
WRBUF |
Write buffer |
0x01 |
Buf addr |
master to slave, no longer than buffer size |
RDBUF |
Read buffer |
0x02 |
Buf addr |
slave to master, no longer than buffer size |
WRDMA |
Write DMA |
0x03 |
8 bits |
master to slave, no longer than length provided by slave |
RDDMA |
Read DMA |
0x04 |
8 bits |
slave to master, no longer than length provided by slave |
SEG_DONE |
Segments done |
0x05 |
||
ENQPI |
Enter QPI mode |
0x06 |
||
WR_DONE |
Write segments done |
0x07 |
||
CMD8 |
Interrupt |
0x08 |
||
CMD9 |
Interrupt |
0x09 |
||
CMDA |
Interrupt |
0x0A |
||
EXQPI |
Exit QPI mode |
0xDD |
Moreover, WRBUF, RDBUF, WRDMA, RDDMA commands have their 2-bit and 4-bit version. To do transactions in 2-bit or 4-bit mode, send the original command ORed by the corresponding command mask below. For example, command 0xA1 means WRBUF in QIO mode.
Mode |
Mask |
|---|---|
1-bit |
0x00 |
DOUT |
0x10 |
DIO |
0x50 |
QOUT |
0x20 |
QIO |
0xA0 |
QPI |
0xA0 |
Segment Transaction Mode¶
Segment transaction mode is the only mode supported by the SPI Slave HD driver for now. In this mode, for a transaction the slave load onto the DMA, the master is allowed to read or write in segments. This way the master doesn’t have to prepare large buffer as the size of data provided by the slave. After the master finish reading/writing a buffer, it has to send corresponding termination command to the slave as a synchronization signal. The slave driver will update new data (if exist) onto the DMA upon seeing the termination command.
The termination command is WR_DONE (0x07) for the WRDMA, and CMD8 (0x08) for the RDDMA.
Here’s an example for the flow the master read data from the slave DMA:
The slave loads 4092 bytes of data onto the RDDMA
The master do seven RDDMA transactions, each of them are 512 bytes long, and reads the first 3584 bytes from the slave
The master do the last RDDMA transaction of 512 bytes (equal, longer or shorter than the total length loaded by the slave are all allowed). The first 508 bytes are valid data from the slave, while the last 4 bytes are meaningless bytes.
The master sends CMD8 to the slave
The slave loads another 4092 bytes of data onto the RDDMA
The master can start new reading transactions after it sends the CMD8