About the ARM PrimeCell GPIO

The PrimeCell GPIO is an Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA)
compliant System-on-Chip (SoC) peripheral that is developed, tested, and licensed by
ARM.
The PrimeCell GPIO is an AMBA slave module that connects to the AdvancedPeripheral Bus (APB). The PrimeCell GPIO provides eight programmable inputs oroutputs that you can control in two modes:

• software mode through an APB bus interface
• hardware mode through a hardware control interface.

You can create ports of different widths (for example 16, 24, 32, and 40 bits) by multipleinstantiation. An interrupt interface is provided to configure any number of pins asinterrupt sources. You can generate interrupts depending on a level, or a transitional value of a pin. At system reset, PrimeCell GPIO lines default to inputs. The PrimeCell
GPIO interfaces with input and output pad cells using a data input, data output, and output enable per pad.
Figure 1-1 on page 1-3 shows the PrimeCell GPIO interfaces.
1.1.1
Features of the PrimeCell GPIO
The PrimeCell GPIO offers:
• Compliance to the AMBA Specification (Rev 2.0) onwards for easy integration into SoC implementation.
• Eight individually programmable input/output pins, default to input at reset.
• Scalability by multiple instantiation to 16, 24, 32, 40, or more bits.
• Programmable interrupt generation capability, from a transition or a level condition, on any number of pins.
• Hardware control capability of PrimeCell GPIO lines for different system
configurations.
• Bit masking in both read and write operations through address lines.
• Identification