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No, if you use a DMA you don't need PIOs or dual part memories. One way to do it would be to use an Avalon Stream interface between the DMA and your hardware. You may need a FIFO between the two in some cases but this can be added in SOPC builder.
The PIOs are fine for slow systems with little amount of data but they are less efficient than a DMA.
Using a dual port memory and an Avalon slave interface should be easier to make, but it seems that you will handle a lot of data so it may be impossible to use on-chip memory to store your data. That's why I'd recommend a DMA.
If you are new to Verilog you may want to start with something simpler than this project though.
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Thank you for the advice. I will use nophutwern's advice to use modelsim to simulate my verilog module. It is true that I don't know about Verilog and this is why I wanted to do a simple calculation of sum and product as as a starting phase. I can't change my project now..too late :(
Anyway, to go back to your suggestion of using Avalon Streaming interface, I found a similar example to the StratixII_DSP_Kit-v1.0.0 design example but this time it has ST interface. This one a is a ready-made SOPC component in Verilog available in the Altera UP Video cores called 'altera_up_avalon_video_edge_detection'. It is available from the altera_upds_setup.exe file in on the ftp download area of Altera Univeristy Program.
I don't care what calculations that component is making but at least we know it is a module written by experts. This module takes in 8-bit data of an image and has Avalon Stream Sink and Source. From what I found on this foum, I have to use SGDMA to interface with this module, something like CPU-> SGDMA(Mem to Stream) -> Altera UP module -> SGDMA (Stream to Mem).
My question is how to initiate the SGDMA transfer to stream data through the UP module? I read about alt_avalon_sgdma_open, _start, _stop etc but I am not sure how to call these functions in my NIOSII C code. Can somebody please give me an example C code that will do that process assuming that I have a 2-d array of integers already initialized at the top of my C code? I also have the CPU connected to the SDRAm and SRAM available on my board.
Thanks a lot.
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