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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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22 years ago

hw multiplier for Cyclone

With NIOS-1 i could select three implementations for multiplications (sw, mul_step, mul). In Nios-2 this feature is complety missing. Is there any way to tell the SOPC-Builder for NIOS-2 to integrate...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
22 years ago

If you generate for a Stratix device and then really compile it on Cyclone device,

you will get a hardware multiplier. However, note that since Cyclone has no DSP multiplier cells

like Stratix does, Quartus will construct the multiplier using LEs. This has the effect of

increasing the size of the Nios II core by 2X-3X and cutting the frequency by 2X-3X.

This is why it wasn't included as an option in Nios II release 1.0 since we did not

think it would be an attractive option for most customers.