
27
P/N: PM1043
REV. 1.0, NOV. 25, 2003
MX53L06402
7 SPI Mode
7.1 Introduction
The SPI mode consists of a secondary, optional communication protocol which is offered by Flashbased
MultiMediaCards. This mode is a subset of the MultiMediaCard protocol, designed to communicate with a SPI channel,
commonly found in Motorola's (and lately a few other vendors') microcontrollers. The interface is selected during the
first reset command after power up (CMD0) and cannot be changed once the part is powered on.
The SPI standard defines the physical link only, and not the complete data transfer protocol. The MultiMediaCard SPI
implementation uses a subset of the MultiMediaCard protocol and command set. It is intended to be used by systems
which require a small number of cards (typically one) and have lower data transfer rates (compared to MultiMediaCard
protocol based systems). From the application point of view, the advantage of the SPI mode is the capability of using
an off-the-shelf host, hence reducing the design-in effort to minimum. The disadvantage is the loss of performance
of the SPI mode versus MultiMediaCard mode (lower data transfer rate, fewer cards, hardware CS per card, etc.).
7.2 SPI Interface Concept
The Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) is a general purpose synchronous serial interface originally found on certain
Motorola microcontrollers. A virtually identical interface can now be found on certain TI and SGS Thomson
microcontrollers as well.
The MultiMediaCard SPI interface is compatible with SPI hosts available on the market. As in any other SPI device,
the MultiMediaCard SPI channel consists of the following four signals:
CS:
Host to card Chip Select signal.
CLK:
Host to card clock signal
DataIn:
Host to card data signal.
DataOut: Card to host data signal.
Another SPI common characteristic is byte transfers, which is implemented in the card as well. All data tokens are
multiples of bytes (8 bit) and always byte aligned to the CS signal.
7.3 SPI Bus Topology
The card identification and addressing methods are replaced by a hardware Chip Select (CS) signal. There are no
broadcast commands. For every command, a card (slave) is selected by asserting (active low) the CS signal (see
Figure 43).
The CS signal must be continuously active for the duration of the SPI transaction (command, response and data). The
only exception occurs during card programming, when the host can deassert the CS signal without affecting the
programming process.
The bidirectional CMD and DAT lines are replaced by unidirectional dataIn and dataOut signals.This eliminates the
ability of executing commands while data is being read or written and, therefore, makes the sequential and multi block
read/write operations obsolete. Only single block read/write commands are supported by the SPI channel.
The SPI interface uses the same 7 signals of the standard MultiMediaCard bus (see Table 21).