ATWINC1500

The ATWINC1500 firmware includes a Host Interface Layer, running on top of a set of components, including a real-time operating system (RTOS), a light-weight network stack, middleware services and a MAC control driver. The ATWINC1500 firmware version supported for this application is 19.3.

The ATWINC1500 can interface a Host MCU using a serial interface allowing a Host MCU application with limited memory and CPU capabilities to access a wide range of connectivity features from peer -to-peer connections, LAN communication and communication with cloud servers.

The ATWINC1500 firmware exchanges binary messages with Host MCU application via SPI interface. The firmware encapsulates several types of Host InterFace (HIF) messages such as device-specific initialization, WLAN configuration (scan, connection, disconnection) and network traffic using a BSD-like socket interface (socket(), close(), bind(), listen(), accept(), send(), sendto(), recv(), recvfrom()).

The ATWINC1500 HIF uses a “push” architecture, where data and events are pushed from ATWINC1500 firmware to the Host MCU in First-come, first-served manner (FCFS). The ATWINC1500 firmware will interrupt the Host MCU using a dedicated GPIO line whenever one or more events occur. The above architecture allows the ATWINC1500 Firmware driver to be flexible enough to run in the following configurations:

No operating system configuration – The Host MCU application main loop is responsible for updating the WINC host driver state machine by calling a specific function to handle pending events and callbacks.
Operating system configuration – A dedicated task can be implemented to handle deferred work from the interrupt handler by calling a specific function to handle pending events and callbacks.