Part 5 answers: What exactly is being asked?

Above flow control sits meaning: a read, a write, an address, a size, a response. The way a protocol describes a transaction decides how much concurrency it allows, what can go wrong, and what software can rely on.

This part covers reads versus writes, address maps and decode errors, register semantics, split transactions, independent channels, posted writes, bursts, byte enables, boundary rules, conversion, attributes, atomics, interrupts, descriptor rings and bridges.

After this part you can

• Explain why AXI splits reads and writes into separate channels.

• Compute the beat addresses and byte enables of any burst.

• Say what an AXI-to-APB bridge cannot carry across.

Warm-up: three questions from Part 4

Answer each in your head before opening it. If two or more feel shaky, revisit Part 4: Flow Control first.

Lessons

Every lesson in this part is ready. Work through them in order: each one sets up the problem the next one solves.

Where other courses go deeper

This course teaches why protocols are designed the way they are. These lessons show how to build or sign off the same ideas, so this part links to them instead of repeating them.

• RTL: Arbitration

Related topics

• Course hub

• Previous: Part 4 · Flow Control

• Next: Part 6 · Concurrency and Performance