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Altera_Forum
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21 years ago

Hardware requirements about Nios II based System

Hello everybody, I'm designing a system which has an ALTERA cyclone FPGA and a external processor. My external processor has a Flash Memory to store its software image. In the FPGA I h...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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21 years ago

Hello Etienne,

Yes you can download both fpga config (includes nios hw) plus the NIOS software in one operation. IF and only IF, your nios software code is contained entirely in onchip rom/ram - Ram which is loaded as part of the configuration, so its actually completely transparent to you. Just take the image generated by quartus and you are set.

I think its not an issue for cyclone family, but in Stratix be warned that code residing in MRAM blocks will NOT be preloaded during configuration. In earlier releases of nios there were only vague warnings for that, so that problem got me occupied for a while.

Reset address: simply make sure your reset vectors point to your ram/rom.

I have this setup working in a cyclone ep1c12 chip, also with an external cpu, but as this cpu is usb hosted I have no flash on it, just a serial boot eeprom. Instead I have an epcs4 flash which is holding the config code(+nios soft) for the cyclone. This flash is programmable from the cpu to obtain online reconfig.

Hope this gives you some ideas.