Nios & Flash

(As the "Software Guy", I thought I'd chime in.)

The real question here is how to run the application program from Flash while

keeping the execution speed up of the NIOS-II processor.

For example, a 110 ns read access Flash (fairly standard, can get faster) means

that the processor can fetch instructions at 1/110 ns or 9.09 MHz rate. Of what

good is running at 100 MHz clock speed if you're limited by the Flash?

Unfortunately, the option of copying from Flash to SRAM and running from the

faster SRAM isn't available to us.

"uiliak" found some burst-mode Flash, but that requires the instruction pre-fetch

to understand this mode, and I have reservations on how useful this would be

in a "random-access"-type program anyway.

So, if you're running your application out of Flash, how do you keep it from

being the bottleneck?

Any clues out there from people who run their apps from Flash?

John