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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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15 years ago

DMA vs MM templates

The goal is for the nios needs to transmit short bursts of data (512bits) from sdram to an ip block every 50 usec. Probably tons of ways to do this, but I figure one way would be for the ip blo...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
15 years ago

The Nios CPU would need to do 16 32-bit transfers to write 512 bits to your IP, and this doesn't seem a lot to do it every 50 us.

You could use a DMA too. A SGDMA component, as an example, could transfer the data to your IP block through an Avalon Stream interface. But if the DMA needs to read your main RAM at a different location each time, I think that the time to fill the DMA descriptor will take some time too, and I'm not sure that you'll gain a lot.