Forum Discussion

Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
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
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
14 years ago

If your processing time is long (more than 10 instructions) then I would build a standard Avalon MM slave rather than using the custom instruction interface. The latter is hard to do right, and if you don't get it right then you will pull the fmax of your processor down.

If you put your accelerator in its own clock domain then you can run it at higher frequencies for better throughput.

If you're using matlab then have you considered using DSP builder advanced block set to turn your design into hardware?