SPI Storm goes beyond SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) and provides a unique set of capabilities to develop, test and debug electronic embedded systems.
SPI Storm’s benefits include:
1) SPI Storm can be used with standard SPI, Dual-SPI and Quad-SPI
Dual-SPI and Quad-SPI are extensions of the SPI protocol. They extend SPI and allow using 2 (Dual-SPI) or 4 (Quad-SPI) data line to increase the data throughput for a defined clock rate.
These protocols are based on the same principles:
1) Standard SPI is used by default;
2) Specific commands instruct the slave that a ‘dual’ or ‘quad’ mode is about to be used – after which:
3) 2 or 4 data lines are used to write to or read from slaves.
2) SPI Storm can be used with custom protocols defined with an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI)
They typically differ from SPI on the following characteristics:
– Extra pulses or sequences executed on the control and the data lines are used with or without clock signal to set slaves in specific ‘service modes’, reset them or wake them up;
– Bi-directional data lines are used to spare on the components pins;
– Open-drain I/Os are used to enable physical data line sharing
… and so on…
3) SPI Storm provides robust hardware capabilities in a USB form factor PC instrument and flexible GUI- or API-based software controls.
– SPI Storm is able to clock serial interfaces up to 100 MHz, a reasonable higher limit for single-ended signaling. Its 32 MB memory buffer guarantees a ‘no-latency’ and ‘cycle-accurate’ signal generation and data sampling in a wide range of applications.
– SPI Storm is delivered by default with SPI Storm Studio software, enabling protocol definition and slave accesses from an intuitive graphical user interface.
– SPI Storm’s API enables more advanced protocol access and test sequences through C/C++, Visual Basic, LabView and many more programming environments.
Read more about SPI Storm’s resources for programmers