Data from FPGA to Ethernet

Hello Shameem,

there are several ways to do a fpga to ethernet data transfer, but you must consider your needs, first of all the required speed.

If the data rate is low, you can still use your current Nios hardware design to read data from a specific location in fpga (registers or shared onchip memory) and then transfer to or from ethernet. This solution is quite simple even for a beginner, provided you don't look for performance.

Instead, if you have huge data and/or high data rate, probably Nios would not be able to keep up the pace and you'd need to redesign the system with a different approach. This would involve building a direct channel from fpga data source to ethernet (i.e. dma). In this case you must also consider what kind of protocol you are using on ethernet. Depending on your specifications you eventually decide if you want to design everything in hardware (maximum performance but greatest design effort) or if you still want to rely on Nios processor (simpler but limited speed).