A Lightweight SPI-Flash Controller Based on AMBA AHB-Lite Bus.

Abstract

The utilization of SPI-Flash in embedded systems is widespread, primarily serving as program storage during the boot process. As a result, the boot process is influenced to some extent by the SPI-Flash controller. This paper presents a lightweight SPI-Flash controller that simplifies the boot process design by establishing a direct connection between the SPI-Flash and AHB-lite bus interface, enabling rapid program execution in RAM instead of directly from the SPI-Flash. Additionally, the controller can function as a bare-metal program downloader for testing the boot process functionality during FPGA-based SoC (system-on-chip) prototype verification. The system-level simulation and FPGA verification results demonstrate that the proposed SPI-Flash controller successfully achieves its intended functional impact in operations to target the Micron N25Q256A SPI-Flash chip, boot process design, and bare-metal program download. The synthesis results under the SMIC 180 nm 1P8M technology process indicate that this SPI-Flash controller exhibits remarkable performance, power consumption, and area utilization. The source code of the proposed lightweight SPI-Flash controller has been uploaded to GitHub as an open-source project.