Advice on developing TCP/IP protocol stack on NIOS

In reply to fheineman

I did succeed in getting a TCP/IP protocol stack working on a Cyclone III board. This was in December 2010. I did try porting this work onto another similar board to produce a product but this ran into difficulties and the project was abandoned. So my memory is rather sketchy.

I was able to demonstrate

- a very simple web server

- Modbus protocol

The components were

NEEK board and the Embedded IP Suite

Quartus II 9.1sp1

NIOS II EDS 9.1 SBT

µCOS II

Altera TSE MAC

Altera SGDMA

Altera webserver.c

Altera http.c

Iniche stack v3.1 from Altera

The areas that caused the most problems were:

Connections between FPGA and the PHY - you have to work this out for yourself and get it right.

Removing µCOS II. After getting the stack working with the OS I then converted to using Superloop to avoid the licence fee. This configuration is not documented and there is no simple# define which will remove the OS easily. I never understood completely how Chronos fitted in.

I never attempted to use lwIP with NIOS, but I still use it to roll out new products based on an ARM microcontroller.