6.10 General Peripherals and Modules

The I/O controller controls the digital I/O pins and contains multiplexer circuitry to allow a set of peripherals to be assigned to I/O pins in a flexible manner. All digital I/Os are interrupt and wake-up capable, have a programmable pullup and pulldown function and can generate an interrupt on a negative or positive edge (configurable). When configured as an output, pins can function as either push-pull or open-drain. Five GPIOs have high-drive capabilities (marked in bold in Section 4).

The SSIs are synchronous serial interfaces that are compatible with SPI, MICROWIRE, and TI's synchronous serial interfaces. The SSIs support both SPI master and slave up to 4 MHz.

The UART implements a universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter function. It supports flexible baud-rate generation up to a maximum of 3 Mbps.

Timer 0 is a general-purpose timer module (GPTM), which provides two 16-bit timers. The GPTM can be configured to operate as a single 32-bit timer, dual 16-bit timers or as a PWM module.

Timer 1, Timer 2, and Timer 3 are also GPTMs. Each of these timers is functionally equivalent to Timer 0.

In addition to these four timers, the RF core has its own timer to handle timing for RF protocols; the RF timer can be synchronized to the RTC.

The I²C interface is used to communicate with devices compatible with the I²C standard. The I²C interface is capable of 100-kHz and 400-kHz operation, and can serve as both I²C master and I²C slave.

The TRNG module provides a true, nondeterministic noise source for the purpose of generating keys, initialization vectors (IVs), and other random number requirements. The TRNG is built on 24 ring oscillators that create unpredictable output to feed a complex nonlinear combinatorial circuit.

The watchdog timer is used to regain control if the system fails due to a software error after an external device fails to respond as expected. The watchdog timer can generate an interrupt or a reset when a predefined time-out value is reached.

The device includes a direct memory access (µDMA) controller. The µDMA controller provides a way to offload data transfer tasks from the Cortex-M3 CPU, allowing for more efficient use of the processor and the available bus bandwidth. The µDMA controller can perform transfer between memory and peripherals. The µDMA controller has dedicated channels for each supported on-chip module and can be programmed to automatically perform transfers between peripherals and memory as the peripheral is ready to transfer more data. Some features of the µDMA controller include the following (this is not an exhaustive list):

• Highly flexible and configurable channel operation of up to 32 channels
• Transfer modes: memory-to-memory, memory-to-peripheral, peripheral-to-memory, and peripheral-to-peripheral
• Data sizes of 8, 16, and 32 bits

The AON domain contains circuitry that is always enabled, except in Shutdown mode (where the digital supply is off). This circuitry includes the following:

• The RTC can be used to wake the device from any state where it is active. The RTC contains three compare and one capture registers. With software support, the RTC can be used for clock and calendar operation. The RTC is clocked from the 32-kHz RC oscillator or crystal. The RTC can also be compensated to tick at the correct frequency even when the internal 32-kHz RC oscillator is used instead of a crystal.
• The battery monitor and temperature sensor are accessible by software and give a battery status indication as well as a coarse temperature measure.