
164 Embedded systems design
A generic DMA controller
A generic controller consists of several components which
control the operation:
• Address generator
This is probably the most important part of a DMA control-
ler and typically consists of a base address register and an
auto-incrementing counter which increments the address
after every transfer. The generated addresses are used
within the actual bus transfers to access memory and/or
peripherals. When a predefined number of bytes have been
transferred, the base address is reloaded and the count
cleared to zero ready to repeat the operation.
• Address bus
This is where the address created by the address ...