14.2 Receive mode
In receive mode, the SFD pin goes active after the start of frame delimiter (SFD) field has been completely received. If address recognition is disabled or is successful, the SFD pin goes inactive again only after the last byte of the MPDU has been received. If the received frame fails address recognition, the SFD pin goes inactive immediately. This is illustrated in Figure 13.
The FIFO pin is active when there are one or more data bytes in the RXFIFO. The first byte to be stored in the RXFIFO is the length field of the received frame, i.e. the FIFO pin goes active when the length field is written to the RXFIFO. The FIFO pin then remains active until the RXFIFO is empty.
If a previously received frame is completely or partially inside the RXFIFO, the FIFO pin will remain active until the RXFIFO is empty.
The FIFOP pin is active when the number of unread bytes in the RXFIFO exceeds the threshold programmed into IOCFG0.FIFOP_THR. When address recognition is enabled the FIFOP pin will remain inactive until the incoming frame passes address recognition, even if the number of bytes in the RXFIFO exceeds the programmed threshold.
The FIFOP pin will also go active when the last byte of a new packet is received, even if the threshold is not exceeded. If so, the FIFOP pin will go inactive once one byte has been read out of the
RXFIFO.
When address recognition is enabled, data should not be read out of the RXFIFO before the address is completely received, since the frame may be automatically flushed by CC2420 if it fails address
CC2420
recognition. This may be handled by using the FIFOP pin, since this pin does not go active until the frame passes address recognition.
Figure 14 shows an example of pin activity when reading a packet from the RXFIFO. In this example, the packet size is 8 bytes,
IOCFG0.FIFOP_THR = 3 and MODEMCTRL0.AUTOCRC is set. The length will be 8 bytes, RSSI will contain the average RSSI level during reception of the packet and FCS/corr contains information of FCS check result and the correlation levels.
14.3 RXFIFO overflow
The RXFIFO can only contain a maximum of 128 bytes at a given time. This may be divided between multiple frames, as long as the total number of bytes is 128 or less. If an overflow occurs in the RXFIFO, this is signalled to the microcontroller by making the FIFO pin go inactive while the FIFOP pin is active. Data already in the RXFIFO will not be affected by the overflow, i.e. frames already received may be read out.
A SFLUSHRX command strobe is required after an RXFIFO overflow to enable reception of new data. Note that the SFLUSHRX command strobe should be issued twice to ensure that the SFD pin goes back to its inactive state.
For security enabled frames, the MAC layer must read the source address of the received frame before it can decide which key to use to decrypt or authenticate. This data must therefore not be overwritten even if it has been read out of the RXFIFO by the microcontroller. If the SECCTRL0.RXFIFO_PROTECTION control bit is set, CC2420 also protects the frame header of security enabled frames until decryption has been performed. If no MAC security is used or if it is implemented outside the CC2420, this bit may be cleared to achieve optimal use of the RXFIFO.
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