LM4550 ac’97 Audio Codec
This is an example hardware driver used to interface a National Semiconductor LM4550 ac97 audio codec with an FPGA running at 100 MHz. The design can be scaled to other clock speeds by either scaling the internal counters, or instantiating an onboard PLL to attain a 100 MHz clock. A Spartan 6 FPGA was used to develop the ac’97 controller, but any FPGA can be used as long as the signal timing is taken into consideration with respect to the main system clock. The data sheet for the LM4550 ac’97 codec can be found below:
LM4550.pdf (611.3 KB)
I/O
The inputs to the controller include the main FPGA oscillator, an active low reset, a serial data in line, a 12.288 MHz bit clock from the ac’97 chip, a 3 bit source selector (slide switches) and a 5 bit volume control (slide switches). The controller’s outputs include a sync signal, serial data output, and an ac97 active low reset signal for initializing the ac97. There are two internal signals to sync the main ac’97 controller with the command state machine. One of these signals pulses every 20us and the other is a signal used for error checking during the tag phase. Consult the LM4550 data sheet for details on the serial frame input/output.
VHDL Hierarchy
The controller has two main parts, the ac97 for generating signals, and converting 18 bit parallel data to serial data to interface the ac97 chip with the FPGA, and the command controller state machine used to configure the registers in the ac97 in a round robin fashion. The FSM can be changed to include user bus signal inputs, routed to each state corresponding to different register values, for on the fly configuration of the codec. The two parts of the ac97 hardware driver are synced with a one cycle, pulsed ready signal. The top of the hierarchy simply routes the parallel outputs of the controller to back into the parallel inputs of the controller on clock edges. This makes the ac97 talk through from input to output. This process in the top level file can be replaced by port mapping user components for various signal processing tasks. The VHDL system hierarchy can be seen in the RTL diagram in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1 – RTL Block Diagram for AC’97 Talkthrough Circuit
Xilinx isim Waveform
Seen below, the red arrows show the register address and command data on the serial output stream to the ac97. The left and right channel data words can be seen in the serial output following the regester and command data. The two bottom signals, ready and latching_cmd, are used to sychronize the two components in the bottom level of the hierarchy. The ready signal should also be used as a sample-ready signal when running the 18 bit parallel data bus to user components.
Figure 2 – AC’97 ISim Test Output
Development
This design has been varified in hardware with a Xilinx Spartan-6 Atlys, by Digilent development board.
VHD Files
The attached .vhd files can be pasted directly into a new or existing project. The signals will require assignment via a .ucf file or through the use of a Plan Ahead style pin assignment tool.
ac97_VHD_Files.zip (5.8 KB)