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Altera_Forum
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20 years ago

Nios II DMA speed

I ran "memtest", "full featured" design on Altera/Microtronix C12 Eval. kit and got SDRAM to SDRAM DMA transfer speed of 13 MB/s. Since this was DMA in and DMA out SDRAM, I believe the speed of DMA in or DMA out SDRAM will be about 26 MB/s which is far below the maximum speed of SDRAM.

Is there anyway to speed up SDRAM DMA speed?

Thanks

3 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    Yes is true

    I have the same problem

    with the same 13 mb/s without DMA and 30 mb/s with DMA speed

    In modelisim i saw that burst mode is not working

    I did't try yet arbitration of DMA

    You can try increse arbitratrion of DMA and maybe it helps set dma arbitration to 8 or 16

    If you use quatrus4.2 and niosv1.1 you can do it but in last version in not working

    because SOPC have bugs with it.

    If you get burst mode let me know, please.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    To AlexS:

    Now I also want to see the time to study the avlon bus .But I don't how to use the modelsim to

    simulate the *.c file running in the niosII.Can you help me ?

    Thank you!
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    yahoo2003,

    because the SDRAM controller keeps only one row open at a time, you won't see anything like full bandwidth when DMA'ing from and to SDRAM (unless you happen to be reading and writing the same open row). If you do a DMA transfer from an onchip memory to SDRAM, or from SDRAM to onchip memory, you should get much better performance (approaching one transfer per clock).

    Increasing the arbitration priorities of the DMA masters, as AlexS suggests, may also help, but once the arbitration priority exceeds the depth of the DMA's internal FIFO you won't get any more benefit. Let me know if you want to pursue this strategy, and I'll look up the ptf assignment which specifies the FIFO depth.