Using the PMOD Connectors – SPI and UART

In the previous chapter, we focused on putting together everything we learned throughout the book. We took our temperature sensor, which relied on math and pipelining, our VGA controller, which had multiple clock domains and state machines, and our character generator. We modified our state machines to display the waveform from our microphone and made a simple project to bring it all together. Now we’ll take a look at what to do if we have external devices to connect.

Up until now, we’ve focused on the resources that are built into the FPGA and on the board. You have probably noticed that the Nexys A7 board has five black connectors, two on the left-hand side, and three on the right-hand side of the board. These are Digilent Peripheral MODule connectors or PMODs.

PMOD connectors allow system designers to purchase pre-made daughter cards or to design their own cards to interface with the FPGA on the board. PMOD connectors...