RT1060 Normal GPIO vs Fast GPIO

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RT1060 Normal GPIO vs Fast GPIO

RT1060 Normal GPIO vs Fast GPIO

The i.MXRT1060 provides tightly coupled GPIOs to be accessed with high frequency.

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RT1060 provides two sets of GPIOs registers to control pad output. GPIO1 to GPIO3 are general GPIOs, and GPIO6 to GPIO8 are tightly GPIOs, but they share the same pad, which means the gpio pin can select from GPIO1/2/3 or GPIO6/7/8.

The registers IOMUXC_GPR_GPR26, IOMUXC_GPR_GPR27, and IOMUXC_GPR_GPR28 are for GPIO selection.

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To select the gpio pin between GPIO1/2/3 or GPIO6/7/8 you can use MCUXpresso Config Tools. For example, if you select pin G10 you can select either GPIOI_IO11 for normal GPIO or GPIO6_IO11 for fast GPIO. 

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I made an example based on the SDK v2.7.0 to compare the speed of Normal GPIO and Fast GPIO. For this, I used pin G10 (GPIOI_IO11 and GPIO6_IO11).

Firstly, I used the normal GPIO pin (GPIOI_IO11). I will toggle the pin by writing directly to the GPIO_DR register. Notice that you can access this pin through J22 pin 3 in the evaluation board, so you can measure the performance of the pin. Here are the results:

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With the normal GPIO pin, we reach a period of 160ns when writing directly to the GPIO_DR register. Now, if we change to the fast GPIO and use the same instructions we have the following results.

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As you can see when using the fast GPIO pin, the period of the signal it's almost one-third of the period when using a normal GPIO.

Now, The A1 silicon of the RT1060 has a new GPIO toggle feature. If we toggle the pin with the new register DR_TOGGLE instead of the GPIO_DR we will get better performance with both pins, normal GPIO and fast. Here are the results of the normal GPIO with the DR_TOGGLE register.

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As you can see when using the register DR_TOGGLE along with the normal GPIO pin we get a period of around 53 ns while when writing to the GPIO_DR register we got 160 ns. When using the register DR_TOGGLE and the fast GPIO we will get the best performance of the pin. Results are shown below.

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Many thanks to @jorge_a_vazquez for his valuable help with this document.

Hope this helps!
Best regards,
Victor.

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Dear Victor Jimenez 員工 ,

   How to enable Fast GPIO ? THANKS A LOT !!

Hello Ellen Lin

You need to select a GPIO pin of GPIO6, GPIO7 or GPIO8. If you followed the steps mentioned above you shouldn't face any problems to activate the fast GPIO. 

Best Regards, 

Victor 

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Last update:
‎05-27-2021 11:10 AM
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