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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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8 years ago

How to use Ethernet ports for DE4 board without Nios II

Hi, I have a DE4 board. I've seen many designs for Ethernet connections on DE4 board, but all of them are related to Qsys and Nios II. My intention here is not to use Nios II, and Qsys if ...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
8 years ago

Reference designs use Nios & Qsys, and the IP behind them, for good reason. It can be very involved.

However, if you want to interface directly to the Ethernet Phy then you can consider implement an MII interface in logic. How practical a solution you can realise will depend on the protocol the kit you're interfacing to is running. Full Ethernet stack? Then it's going to be difficult.

See Wikipedia 'media-independent interface (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/media-independent_interface)' for starters.

Cheers,

Alex