Design and FPGA Implementation of UART Using Microprogrammed Controller

This paper presents an implementation of Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter (UART) controller based on Microprogrammed Controller on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA. Our design of UART is fully functional and synthesizable. It is coded using Verilog based top-down hierarchical design methodology and realized in Spartan-3E FPGA using Xilinx ISE Webpack 14.7. The implementation results demonstrate that the design can operate at a maximum clock frequency of 218.248 MHz. The maximum clock frequency of hardwired implementation of UART controller is 192.773 MHz. We also compare our Microprogrammed implementation of UART controller to the standard ROM method; our implementation uses less number of bits and hence small number of storage elements.