Serial UART Communication

Serial (UART) communication is common among many shields and breakout boards, but using the standard Arduino pins (D0/D1) for serial communication can be problematic, since those pins are also used for the Arduino programming and debug interface.

One common workaround for this problem is to use Arduino’s SoftSerial library which provides a mechanism for creating a “virtual” serial port on arbitrary pins.  However, these serial interfaces suffer performance penalties since the low-level functionality of the protocol itself needs to be handled by the microcontroller. 

The UART XB provides the option to add hardware serial communication (UART) ports to an Alorium board.  Using the UART XB can improve performance over the SoftSerial library since the functionality remains in the FPGA hardware and offloads the microcontroller from handling the additional serial communication. 

Since this XB is a standalone block, it can also be instantiated multiple times to create parallel UART interfaces as needed.