Tiny Serial Peripheral (TSP) interface

The Tiny Serial Peripheral interface was introduced in May/June 2004.

TSP is based on having a small add-on board, like a simple SPice board, with its own processor. The TSP board communicates via a low speed serial data link to the main SPLat processor. The data exchanges consist of variables in bit, byte, word (16-bit) or Long (32-bit) formats. There is also provision for strings up to 16 bytes in length. Data is exchanged via the UV registers.

The TSP peripheral will contain a given number of variables, held in its memory. The SPLat processor can poke data into those variables and peek at (read) the data in them. What the data is, does or means depends on the individual TSP peripheral board.

We classify TSP as a type of SPice board simply because it uses the same SPice connector. The functionality is actually considerably more sophisticated. Initial TSP products will include an embedded web server, a multiple high speed quadrature encoder interface with comparison registers and a 2-channel 12-bit thermocouple interface.

The TSP is programmed using a special group of instructions that can exchange the various data types.