Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorNow I have to interject. Gentlemen, the terms hardware engineer and software engineer are dying fast. You must become a design engineer with the ability to cross that line at least somewhat. I am an FPGA / PCB design engineer. However, I also have an extensive software skill set and indeed have a minor in Computer Science. The days of hardware design being seperate from software design are disappearing. You can't design your board and then throw it over the wall to the software engineer and ask him to test it for you.
Hardware is utterly worthless without something to make use of it. Now with regards to the Ethernet offering from Altera: 1 - I have been extremely pleased with SoPC builder. I don't think I've ever had it crash on me and it is extremely simple to use. The truth is that Altera has invested significant amounts of money in SoPC builder and the Avalon fabric. It generates a very minimal amount of files and the file structure is very simple. If you truly want that proven to you, go use Xilinx's EDK for a day. I use both regularly and I can easily tell you that EDK will likely have you giving up on embedded soft-core processors forever. 2 - I don't know how Altera could make it much easier. Basically you drop in an ethernet MAC and the TCP/IP stack and it works right off the bat. Now if you want to modify the Simple Socket Server example, you need to know sockets. But that has nothing to do with Altera or Ethernet. Sockets are what they are and they would be the same level of difficulty no matter where you were trying to implement them. 3 - If you are going to do anything useful with ethernet then truly you are going to need some software skills (be they yours or someone else's). Sockets and TCP/IP are not hardware elements. With regards to ethernet, once you get past the lowest layer of the ISO model, you are no longer hardware. Now you may purchase some IC's that implement a TCP/IP stack but really all you've done is paid someone else to do the software for you. If you need help, then don't spend your time pouring over the documentation if it's not helping you understand what it is you need to do. Come here and ask for help. There are many individuals experience and for them this stuff might be easy. The first time I implemented ethernet on the NIOS, I had not had any prior experience with sockets programming. But I was able to get it running with a little time investment. The problem I see with Bob's requirements is they are basically telling him to implement Gigabit capable ethernet using zero resources. Now if you really want to go down the path of trying to implement a TCP/IP stack in the NIOS using only the onchip RAM ... We can see if that's possible. With regards to using the InterNiche TCP/IP stack in superloop mode (no Operating System), There is a patch available on the internet for the version of the stack that was released with version 7.1 of the Altera tools. We ran the patch on that version then ported the changes over to 7.2. We still use that version of the stack to run in superloop mode even though we are using version 9.0 of the Altera tools. http://www.nioswiki.com/user:admin/%22super_loop%22_nichestack Jake
