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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
12 years agoUsage of DMA from PIO to SDRAM shared by NIOS
Hello everybody, I was wondering if someone could respond to my following question connected with DMA: I have functional NIOS II system with TSE and SDRAM as a main data and instruction me...
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
12 years agoYou don't need any special component. The fabric will connect the masters and the slaves together.
The data bus is usually 32 bits, so the DMA can transfer 4 bytes per cycles. Your calculation is assuming that the ram can take one word per cycle, and this of course depends on the type of RAM and the kind of transfer. A DMA transfer can use burst transfers, so most DRAMs will be very fast with this kind of transfer. If the Nios CPU is trying to access the SDRAM, it will be shared with the DMA master, so the DMA throughput will decrease. IIRC you can adjust priorities for both masters, or if you design your own component with an Avalon master, you can lock the arbiter to be sure you have exclusive access to the memory during the transfer.