IEEE 1284 softcore-implementation issues

In this paper, we present a re-usable softcore for the IEEE 1284 protocol for parallel data transmission. It consists of two parts. One is the firmware to cope with the IEEE-1284 protocol being executed in the processor and the other is the hardware engine to accelerate the basic communication mechanism. Using our evaluation system, it is verified that the designed core is fully compliant with the specification. Additionally, we show the results on the performance comparison between the compatibility and ECP modes of the IEEE-1284 standard.