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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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20 years ago

ABOUT RAM

I try to use a SDRAM on a custom board instead of SRAM. Since a SDRAM consumes too many pins, I'd like to share data bus with other peripherals, such as LAN, USB. Can it be achieved? ...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
20 years ago

The SDRAM interface (I'm assuming you are talking about the controller component in SOPC Builder) uses signals that are specific to SDRAM. It may be possible to throw some glue logic to hack together some sort of shared interface but you are making a lot of work for yourself. If you have tri-state peripherals (take a look at a standard or full featured reference design in the examples folder of your Nios II install) you can share the interface like that (ethernet, sram, flash for example).

Sorry I can't be of more help (I don't know enough about your board to help). Also I'm assuming you haven't gone to board layout since you are asking whether or not you can share the SDRAM signals. I would look at the devices on your board to see if they can be shared instead of looking to see if the SOPC Builder components can share the bus (if your devices can't handle it then there isn't much you can do from the other end).

Good-luck