![]() Over the years, I’ve found that USB-to-Serial devices that implement an FTDI solution are of superior quality. I’ve tried many devices that resulted in a Windows blue-screen of death, in modern Windows NT-based OS (WinNT/2k/XP/Vista/7), and these days the only thing that can really bring down your system to the blue-screen is a kernel-mode error–or more likely- a bad device driver. ![]() The biggest problem I’ve seen is that the drivers are of questionable quailty. Having worked with such devices since 2003, I can tell you that many are flaky and high unstable. For applications requiring legacy ports, we are recommended to use USB-to-Serial Port adaptors. Apple abandoned serial ports over a decade ago, and recent Dell desktop PCs don’t even have serial and parallel ports. It turns out that the PC industry really feels that serial ports are legacy, however. What could be simpler than the good ol’ serial port, right? Every telecom application I’ve worked on has had hardware with a serial port for debug and engineering management. Why? Well, I don’t want to spend 50% of the time tweaking kernel mode device drivers and data transfer libraries–I want to focus on the FPGA. ![]() A primitive interface, you might say? Having professionally developed both USB and PCI solutions, I was searching for a development board that had the simplest interface with the FPGA. The LatticeXP2 development kit I selected has an RS232 connector and buffer hooked up to the FPGA.
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