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Altera_Forum
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11 years ago

Newbie memory question

Hi, I got a Terasic DE0-nano board with a Cyclone IV FPGA. My design is writing data in the memory. I use a NIOS II softcore too and I'd like it to read the FPGA memory and the data I wrote in a h...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
11 years ago

Binome, if you need to access a component (like an internal memory instance) from both hardware and software it's recommended that you use Qsys for that. You can use the "On-Chip Memory" component and connect it to your NiosII data master interface, this way the processor can read/write this memory through software.

In order to access this memory using your hardware component you can adapt your component to use the Avalon Memory-Mapped interface protocol. You can found information about it in the Avalon Interface Specification: http://www.altera.com/literature/manual/mnl_avalon_spec.pdf

Your hardware component can be imported into Qsys by creating a custom component. You can find information about it here:

http://www.altera.com/literature/hb/qts/qsys_components.pdf

Also, there are free online video trainings on the Altera website, please check the Introduction to Qsys and Custom IP Development Using Avalon and AXI Interfaces