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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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16 years ago

On-Chip Memory Required?

Hello all, I am new to NIOS, but quite familiar with FPGAs otherwise. I'd like to setup a NIOS II processor on a design that is already in place. I'd like to keep the on-chip memory usage to a bare...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
16 years ago

The bootloader can be placed at any memory address location. Obviously for the sake of usability, it needs to be in non-volatile memory.

As far as onchip memory usage. Even if you don't explicitly add onchip memory to your SoPC system, the processor does require some. Any cache you add to the CPU will use onchip memory. Aside from this the CPU will generally use RAM blocks for some pieces within the processor. Some of these might be inferred and you might be able to reduce it by telling Quartus to not infer RAM for these modules.

Jake