Design of a micro-UART for SoC application

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a universal asynchronous receiver and transmitter (UART), which is fully functional and synthesizeable. Due to its modularity, configurability and extremely compact size, the proposed UART is named as micro-UART and it is ideal for system-on-a-chip (SoC) application. The core is usable as an intellectual property. Verilog hardware description language (HDL) in the Altera's MAX-PLUS II environment has been used for its design, compilation and simulation. The UART has been implemented using Altera's FPGA technology.