Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART) is an essential and the
most important part in a communication system especially in long distance
communication system. A UART transmitter is used in most of the communication
system to send information or data from one location to another location that are
separated in great distance. The objective of this project is to design and develop a Field
Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based UART transmitter. The UART transmitter was
designed using Xilinx Foundation Series 2.1i computer aided design tools and
implemented in Xilinx XC4010XL PC84 FPGA. The configuration code of this design
was programmed into ST M27C512 Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory
(EPROM) which could be downloaded to Xilinx XC4010XL PC84 FPGA using Xilinx
Foundation development board. Features such as different baud rate (2400, 480, 9600,
etc), number data bits (5, 6, 7 or 8 bits), parity bit option, parity bit mode (odd or even),
number of stop bit (1 or 2 stop bits) and First In/First Out (FIFO) buffer were included in
this design. The default serial transmission parameters of this design are baud rate of
9600, 8 data bits, parity bit option is disabled and 1 stop bit (9600-8-N-1).