Reservation about UART1 FIFO in C8051F34x in MCE mode

I wrote a multi-processor serial bus protocol. It was to connect several
F340 as slaves to one Cypress FX2LP as master. The master sent out a
command byte with the ninth bit set which alerted the slaves to what was
happening next. Interested slaves then participated in various ways (but
only one sending, of course).

It was unreliable.

Stripped down to one master and one slave, it was still unreliable.
Eventually, I had the slave's ISR pulse when it received anything and pulse
when it received a command byte (ninth bit set). Because of the nature of
the protocol we could also produce a pulse when an unexpected command byte
was received.

On the scope we could see those pulses and also the serial line going into
the F340. We could easily follow the traffic, bytes being received, and
pulses happening. We post triggered on the "unexpected command byte". And
there we had it. The software had received again a command byte it had
received a few bytes earlier but which had not come in on Rx.

I changed the software in the F340 to use UART0 (no FIFO) and the problem
went away.

We have reported this concern (that their FIFO is somehow re-issuing a
command byte) to SiLab. They wanted me to move the master software to the
PC and use PortMon (I'd have thought a scope trace was much more
conclusive). Then they wanted a small test program.

But we have work to do, having lost time on this problem. The email is just
a flag in case you see something like this. I had a difficult time nailing
this as timing seemed to matter, so adding/subtracting debug made it move
around. Eventually logging events to a memory buffer showed what to look
for on the scope.

HTH

Bill

www.SynectixLtd.com


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