The Lattice Semiconductor UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter) IP Core is designed for use in serial communication, supporting the RS-232. The UART IP Core has many characteristics similar to those of the NS16450 UART. To preserve FPGA resources, the UART IP Core is not identical to the NS16450 UART. As such, it is not source code compatible. This means the existing driver code for the NS16450 UART does not work on the Lattice UART IP Core.
The UART IP Core performs two main functions:
(1) Serial-to-parallel conversion on data characters received from an external UART device; and (2) Parallel-to-serial conversion on data characters received from the Host located in the FPGA
Resource Utilization details are available in the IP Core User Guide.