35.10 Receive and Transmit Buffers

The UART uses small buffer areas to transmit and receive data. These are sometimes referred to as FIFOs.

The receiver has a Receive Shift Register (RSR) and two or more buffer registers. The buffer at the top of the FIFO (earliest byte to enter the FIFO) is retrieved by reading the UxRXB register.

The transmitter has one or more Transmit Shift Register (TSR) and one buffer register. Writes to UxTXB go to the transmit buffer and then immediately to the TSR, if it is empty. When the TSR is not empty, writes to UxTXB are held and then transferred to the TSR when it becomes available.