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Altera_Forum
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7 years ago

Data Transfer from FPGA-to-HPS

Hi, I am very new to the Altera FPGA suite (and FPGAs in general), and was looking to get some advice on how to transfer data from the FPGA to the HPS. I've done fair amount of research, but I ...
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Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
7 years ago

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There are basically two options.

First, you could hook up the FPGA to HPS bridge and carve out some DDR3 RAM to be used for storage purposes. The FPGA to HPS bridge has the master on the FPGA side and the slave in the HPS side. So, the FPGA side is the one issuing write requests, those requests have to go into some virtual memory space, and it might as well be RAM (unless it is a HPS-side peripheral.) You could write into RAM through the FPGA->SDRAM bridge, but that is not guaranteed to maintain cache coherency (so, as I understand, HPS-side memory reads may result in old data, even after the transfer, if it happens to be in the cache.) FPGA->HPS is slower than FPGA->SDRAM, but should be plenty fast enough for your task.

Alternately, you could go the other way around. In Qsys/Platform Designer, instantiate an altera_hps, an altera_avalon_onchip_memory2, and an altera_avalon_mm_bridge. Hook them up like so:

altera_hps.h2f_axi_master -> altera_avalon_onchip_memory2.s1

altera_avalon_mm_bridge.m0 -> altera_avalon_onchip_memory2.s1

Export altera_avalon_mm_bridge.s0.

Now you have some on-chip RAM (the amount configurable through altera_avalon_onchip_memory2's properties) that you can write on FPGA side through the pins you just exported and read on HPS side starting at the address 0xC0000000. The downside is that you don't have a whole lot of RAM to work with (your entire chip has something like 300 kbytes worth of M10Ks) so you need to be frugal.

P.S. I'm basically learning this as I go along myself, so take this with a grain of salt.

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First off thanks!

Now going off what you said I think the F2H bridge is the best option for me so I don't have to worry about the cache coherency issues of the SDRAM bridge. Speed I don't believe should be an issue since I only need 80Mbitps transfer speeds, and I saw in another forum post that the bridge has 133 MHz frequency and I know it can support 128-bit width so that would give 2.12Gigabytes per second? In the case that I use the F2H bridge to setup DDR3 writes how would that look? I have found plenty of examples of H2F and the H2F lw, but none of the F2H except for the Altera one, which I can't seem to get to work on my DE0-Nano-SoC since it was written for the Cyclone V dev board.

Thanks again for all your help!