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SPI inter-byte duration

Hello, I've been working on porting a bit-banged control of a peripheral to use nRF51 SPI--which is just SPI rather than SPIM (therefore no DMA). Observe the SPICLK waveform when I choose 4 MHz: image description

The byte itself is emitted at 4 MHz. But the huge inter-byte distance remains constant down to about 1 MHz CLK speed. I guess that's just how it is with SPI (not SPIM). In the waveform above, one can see that the maximum effective SPI speed is roughly 14 us / 1 B => 570 KHz, which is only slightly faster than the maximum effective SPI speed when I bit-bang using GPIO on an STM32L1 (Cortex M3) ~ 400 KHz. It nearly negates the arguments for using the SPI peripheral over bit-bang (except for some battery savings by using WFE).

I doubt there is anything I can do to improve the situation, but thought I'd check with experts just in case. Thanks for reading.

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