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Altera_Forum
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10 years ago

On Nios II IP licensing and IDE

Dear Experts, I am relatively new to Altera FPGAs (and the Nios II soft-core). The design I am now responsible for includes a Cyclone III FPGA on which a Nios II processor is instantiated. I re...
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Altera_Forum
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10 years ago

The Nios license is required for integrating the Nios IP core into the FPGA design, so you need it whenever you rebuild the Quartus project.

If you don't have a valid licence the Nios core would work only in OpenCores mode, i.e. as long as you keep USB-Blaster attached.

The software part is not affected by the license. You can use IDE, sw build tools for Eclipse or script files to create Nios projects, compile them, program and debug the target without bothering if you have a valid licence or not. In other words, the licence is only for the 'hardware' part.

Please also note that the /e (economy) variant of Nios processor is free: in this case you don't even need licensing for integrating the IP into your FPGA .