PPI — Programmable peripheral interconnect

The programmable peripheral interconnect (PPI) enables peripherals to interact autonomously with each other using tasks and events independent of the CPU. The PPI allows precise synchronization between peripherals when real-time application constraints exist and eliminates the need for CPU activity to implement behavior which can be predefined using PPI.

Figure 1. PPI block diagram

The PPI system has, in addition to the fully programmable peripheral interconnections, a set of channels where the event end point (EEP) and task end points (TEP) are fixed in hardware. These fixed channels can be individually enabled, disabled, or added to PPI channel groups (see CHG[n] registers), in the same way as ordinary PPI channels.

The PPI provides a mechanism to automatically trigger a task in one peripheral as a result of an event occurring in another peripheral. A task is connected to an event through a PPI channel. The PPI channel is composed of three end point registers, one EEP, and two TEPs. A peripheral task is connected to a TEP using the address of the task register associated with the task. Similarly, a peripheral event is connected to an EEP using the address of the event register associated with the event.

On each PPI channel, the signals are synchronized to the 16 MHz clock to avoid any internal violation of setup and hold timings. As a consequence, events that are synchronous to the 16 MHz clock will be delayed by one clock period, while other asynchronous events will be delayed by up to one 16 MHz clock period.

Each TEP implements a fork mechanism that enables a second task to be triggered at the same time as the task specified in the TEP is triggered. This second task is configured in the task end point register in the FORK registers groups, e.g. FORK.TEP[0] is associated with PPI channel CH[0].

There are two ways of enabling and disabling PPI channels:

• Enable or disable PPI channels individually using the CHEN, CHENSET, and CHENCLR registers.
• Enable or disable PPI channels in PPI channel groups through the groups’ ENABLE and DISABLE tasks. Prior to these tasks being triggered, the PPI channel group must be configured to define which PPI channels belong to which groups.

PPI tasks (for example, CHG[0].EN) can be triggered through the PPI like any other task, which means they can be hooked to a PPI channel as a TEP. One event can trigger multiple tasks by using multiple channels and one task can be triggered by multiple events in the same way.