el_es wrote on Thursday, August 14, 2008:
Hello all,
so I’ve started digging into the documentation of PIC18F2455/2550/4455/4550.
The target I wish to code for is the *4550.
Must admit, that the memory map and access modes are a bit weird to me.
But nevertheless, reading through the FreeRTOS PIC18 port code, I see the need to take the USB memory hole into consideration…
Background :
- The PIC uC’s mentioned above, sport a USB module.
- The module is communicating with the core via special dual-port RAM area
Now the tricky bit comes :
- The USB memory area is mapped to memory banks 4 to 7 (400h to 7FFH)
- Considering the GPR area (general-purpose, I suppose that means plain RAM) starts at 060h, the area usable for us is 3 banks*256b (Bank1, Bank2, Bank3) = 768b and area 060h – 0FFh (160b) area of Bank0. Leaving us with 928 bytes available…
- the manual states, that once the USB module is enabled, the bank 4 (used for USB buffer management) (400h-4FFh) should not be used at all by user code, and the other banks, even if not used for buffers, are not safe.
Conclusion :
- the PIC18FF2455/2550/4455/4550 port needs to be considered being sufficiently different from the normal PIC18 port, to be a separate port.
Question(s):
- to save RAM during context switch, would it be considerable to omit saving/restoration of the 22 bytes of tmpdata and MATHDATA at all? It is bad enough to have the sfr’s and ‘up to’ 3*31 bytes for the hardware return stack addresses.
Ridicule :
- maybe this device(s) just needs an I2C(SPI?) RAM chip attached and the context switching data to be put/pulled there, not into main memory…