Glossary

SPI

Serial Peripheral Interface Bus
A synchronous serial data link that operates in full duplex mode. Devices communicate in master/slave mode where the master device initiates the data frame. Multiple slave devices are allowed with individual slave select (chip select) lines.

CAN

Controller-area network
A computer network protocol and bus standard designed to allow microcontrollers and devices to communicate with each other without a host computer.

PAL

Processor Abstraction Layer
Provides an interface between software services and the processor, making the services processor independent and therefore portable.

PS/2

Personal System/2
PS/2 is the connector for connecting a mouse or keyboard to a system. The name is derived from IBM's Personal System/2 series of personal computers. PS/2 connectors replace the older RS-232 serial mouse connector and the older 5-pin DIN connector for keyboards.

UART8

Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (8-bit)
Integrated circuit that translates 8-bit data between parallel and serial forms. UART is often used in combination with communication standards like RS232.

I2C

Inter-Integrated Circuit
I²C is a multi-master serial bus. This type of bus is used to access low speed peripherals. I²C is typically used for peripherals where simplicity and low manufacturing cost are more important than speed

I2S

Inter-IC Sound or Integrated Interchip Sound
I²S is an electrical serial bus interface standard. This type of bus is used to access digital audio devices. A typical application is its use in a CD player to carry PCM information between the CD transport and the D/A converter.

POSIX

Portable Operating System Interface
Family of related standards: IEEE Std 1003.n (where n is a number). POSIX is developed by the Portable Applications Standard Committee (PASC) of the IEEE Computer Society. POSIX is based on UNIX and defines a standard way for an application to interface to the operating system.

Peripheral device

In this context, a component on the schematic which will be instantiated on the FPGA. It is either an I/O port that is connected to a device on the NanoBoard, or a dedicated piece of hardware on the FPGA to perform a complex algorithm (e.g. a JPEG decoder).
In other contexts, peripheral devices may refer to the processor: analogous to an FPGA (processor + memory + peripherals), a processor may consist of a core + memory + peripherals (mostly I/O ports).

Driver

A device driver simplifies programming by acting as a translator between a peripheral device and the application that controls it. It handles the interrupts (either triggered by the device connected to the peripheral or generated by the peripheral itself), and it presents a more convenient interface to the application.

Service

Hardware independent interface (or an interface that is specific for an entire class of devices). Via a service you can write source code using a general API. Therefore it is possible to write C source code for writing a file without having to know whether the file physically is written to a harddrive, SD-card, ram-drive etc.
Note: a service in the context of server/client architectures is something completely different and has no relation with services as used within the SSAS context.