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Altera_Forum
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14 years ago

How much overhead using NIOS?

Just starting out in the FPGA programming process. I’ve tested the BeMicro FPGA MCU Evaluation Board with Nios II and have run some of the samples. Now that I have an idea of how it all works togethe...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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14 years ago

Following up...

@dwh, that sample is a great starting point for the next step in my learning. Thanks. The recommended platform is the NIOS II Embedded Evaluation kit. I don’t mind spending the money on the kit but it looks like it has several features (LCD for example) that I really don’t need right now. Is there a less feature rich/more focused product I could use to implement this example?

@af1010, is the ‘custom instruction mechanism’ the C-2-Hardware code optimization that Altera produces? For the implementation testing, I’ve already got the routine working in multiple high level languages (C, java, c#) just to test the performance of various systems. It looks like Matlab and then Verilog are the next places to go. There should not be any floating point calculations and there should be low amounts of data transfer relative to the algorithmic work applied to the data, so I am really hoping that the FPGA will be the platform to target to achieve good speed.