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TMS320F28388D: DIFERENCE BETWEEN SCI and UART in TMS320F28388D

Part Number: TMS320F28388D
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: C2000WARE

Hello,

As I am new to the TI controllers, I confused what is the difference between SCI and UART?

Because when I used LAUNCHPAD (TMS329F28379D) i could see only SCI but control card (TMS320F28388D) is having both SCI and UART.

Is there any difference between  UART and SCI or both are same, Could some one please clarify on this?

Thanks & Regards

Bandi

  • Hi Bandi,

    Thank you for your question. UART and SCI are different modules that both use a UART protocol. The main characteristics of the UART protocol are that there are only 2 physical pin connections (TX: transmit and RX: receive), a shared baud rate (bits/second) between the two communicating devices, and that the communication is asynchronous (no clock signal is shared). The TMS329F28379D has only an SCI module (accessible on the c28x core) whereas the TMS320F28388D has both SCI (accessible on the c28x core) and UART (accessible on the CM core). 

    Both SCI and UART can be used to communicate with another device that has a UART module. The main differences to consider when choosing which module to use are the following:

    • UART has DMA access whereas SCI does not.
    • UART has more configurable baud rates than SCI (due to having a fractional baud rate divisor), and a higher maximum baud rate.
    • UART can only trigger an interrupt at a minimum of 2 bytes, so in most cases only an even number of characters can be transmitted/received at a time. The SCI does not have this limitation, it can trigger an interrupt at as low as 1 byte empty/full.

    There are some other differences between UART and SCI when it comes to the flow of data and how to interface with each module. See the SCI and UART sections of the F2838x User Guide. We also offer software examples for interfacing with both modules in the C2000ware software package, located in [C2000ware install]/driverlib/[device]/examples/c28x/sci and [C2000ware install]/driverlib/f2838x/examples/cm/uart. Let me know if you have any more questions.

    Best Regards,

    Delaney

  • Hi Delaney Woodward,

    Thank you for sharing the information

    Regards

    Bandi