The Peripheral DMA is a simple DMA which has been architected to specifically meet the data transfer needs of peripherals, which perform data transfers using memory mapped registers accessed via a standard non-coherent bus fabric. The PDMA module is intended to be located close to one or more peripherals which require an external DMA for data movement and is architected to reduce cost by using VBUSP interfaces and supporting only statically configured Transfer Request (TR) operations.

The PDMA is only responsible for performing the data movement transactions which interact with the peripherals themselves. Data which is read from a given peripheral is packed by a PDMA source channel into a PSI-L data stream which is then sent to a remote peer UDMA-P destination channel which then performs the movement of the data into memory. Likewise, a remote UDMA-P source channel fetches data from memory and transfers it to a peer PDMA destination channel over PSI-L which then performs the writes to the peripheral.

The PDMA architecture is intentionally heterogeneous (UDMA-P + PDMA) to right size the data transfer complexity at each point in the system to match the requirements of whatever is being transferred to or from. Peripherals are typically FIFO based and do not require multi-dimensional transfers beyond their FIFO dimensioning requirements, so the PDMA transfer engines are kept simple with only a few dimensions (typically for sample size and FIFO depth), hardcoded address maps, and simple triggering capabilities.

Multiple source and destination channels are provided within the PDMA which allow multiple simultaneous transfer operations to be ongoing. The DMA controller maintains state information for each of the channels and employs round-robin scheduling between channels in order to share the underlying DMA hardware.

For more information, see PDMA Controller section in DMA Controllers chapter in the device TRM.