Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorCurrently I don't have a project in mind. My experience from FPGAs is limited to two university courses in embedded systems (multi-core NIOS II) and one VHDL course. At this point I want a good starter kit that I won't outgrow quickly and that will be supported by the latest Quartus Lite release for a few more years. The DE-1 SoC or the Cyclone V GX boards are in a reasonable price and feature range, but I am open to other suggestions.
Looking at the user manual's block diagram (p10), it seems that the device is partitioned so that some peripherals (e.g. the SDRAM) belong to the ARM (HPS) partition, thus enforcing a design that could be described as "an ARM with an FPGA add-on". It would make it difficult to do multi-NIOS-core designs, as they would not have direct access to SDRAM(?). On the other hand, the SoC has support for OpenCL (and embedded Linux via Yocto?). And, if you are only interested in <= 2 cores, the ARM seems to be far better than the NIOS cores. Please correct or expand. http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive_download.pl?language=english&no=836&fid=3a3708b0790bb9c721f94909c5ac96d6 (DE-1 SoC user manual) BR /Niclas
