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Nyan Keys - An FPGA Keyboard Bitstream

A Lattice ICE40HX4K parallel keys interface for mechanical keyboards with integrated debouncing cores per key. This IP essentially performs the following functions

1. Consumes the state of every keys in parallel once per clock cycle. (12MHz)
2. Keeps track of the key state changes and debouncing eagerly.
3. Sends over state changes to the SPI slave as they occour.
4. Sends over a state ever 50 milliseconds regardless.

FPGA IP

FPGA IP is designed to be build using Yosys and Nextpnr. This parallel keys interface has been validated on the Lattice ICE40HX4K 144TQFP FPGAs. The IP is designed and seperated into 3 main parts.

• Key switch cores (keys.v)
• SPI master core (MODE 0) COPL=0, CPHA=0 (spi.v)
• Global glue logic (spi_keys.v)

Key Switching Core

Each key (switch) in the nyan keys physical design will generate one key switch 'core'. The key switch core is the programmable logic that is used to read the keys state and perform debouncing as well as produce an output state that is passed to a SPI slave device. This IP acts as the master.

All mehcnial switches have some form of bounce to them. The term bounce is used to refer to the total time a singal takes to settle. As a real world example when you press a Cherry MX Blue/Green switch it could take up to 5ms before the singal has stopped bouncing between high and low. Removing debouncing logic on a keyboard would have the effect of the user seeing double key presses.

In it's simplest form this design outputs a one hot vector that represents the states of each key as 0 or 1 (high or low) and send that over a SPI interface as a master when either of the following conditions occours.

• The array of keys changes state and that keys debounce timer is not active
• 50ms has passed since the last broadcast of a keys state.

outputs of the Lattice Ice40hx series ICs.

• Key state - Represents the physical key. [Pressed/Released]
• Logic Level - The logic level of net to the key itself.
• Direction State - Internal debounced logic level of the one hot key state register.

Certainly! Here's the corrected text for your GitHub readme.md:

The actual mechanism for debouncing is incredibly simple. It involves an up counter that locks out the state change of a key until it has reached a threshold value. Compared to the original Nyan Keys FPGA design, which had an up and down counter, using an up-only counter allows for the design to have a smaller footprint. It also enables instant response to switch state changes as long as the debounce period has elapsed.

After configuration, the FPGA resets all 8-bit counters (Ice40HX4K) to 0xff. When the counter is at 0xff, the state may be changed because that signals the debounce timer has completed. Once any key is pressed, the FPGA immediately changes that key's bit in the bit vector to represent the new state. Then, the counter is reset to 0x00 and will begin to increment with each clock cycle to the key's module. While the counter is not equal to 0xff, the state won't change, so any bouncing of the switch is ignored. After the timer reaches 0xff again, the state of the key can be changed instantly.

The bit vector size is dependent on the number of keys on a keyboard; in the case of a 61-key, 60% board, the total number of bits needed is 61. However, since the SPI slave only reads out bytes, we have to use 8 bytes (64 bits). This bit vector is continuously written to block RAM, which is then addressed and read out directly by the SPI slave.

FPGA Limits

Future

One of the major features that could be implemented at a later time would be the use of in memory per switch debounce counter thresholds. This means that instead of having a global state of all switches are debounced in at count value 8'bxxxxxxxx. The user could tune each switch to the lowest possible latency before bouncing occours. This would work extremely well for designs that have multiple switch types.