Forum Discussion
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
15 years agoA DMA is told what to do by a CPU normally but the CPU stays out of the data path. For example the CPU in your case would tell the DMA to read 'x' number of bytes from your camera and write them to address 'y' in memory.
Your external micro-controller could be the one in control of the DMA. If you think the CPU telling the DMA what to do will add too much overhead then you may be able to use a scatter gather DMA which will buffer multiple descriptors (transfer requests) to hide any CPU to DMA inefficiencies.