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Altera_Forum
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14 years ago

Can I make stand-alone NiosII system?

Hi,all. I am going to build the stand-alone NiosII system. Already, I could build PC-connecting NiosII system but I don't know how to build the stand-alone (so PC-NOT-connecting) NiosII system....
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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14 years ago

For flash programming that would be the best document to read. It might point you at other documents as well.

This is what I mean about baking the software right into the .sof file:

1) Generate your system in SOPC Builder/Qsys, make sure a large on-chip memory is present and it is configured to be pre-initialized.

2) Create and compile your software, ensure that a .hex file is created for the on-chip memory

3) Compile your hardware design in Quartus

The hex file created in# 2 becomes part of the hardware image in step# 3. So when the .sof generated in step# 3 you now have a hardware image that contains both the hardware design and software contents pre-initialized in the on-chip RAM. This is only feasible if your software is fairly small since on-chip memory is a limited resource in FPGAs.