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Altera_Forum
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15 years ago

General SOPC and Quartus

First a little background: My company recently sponsored 3 days of Quartus training for my team (it was good training). Following the training the engineers on my team were given different tas...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
15 years ago

jake is absolutly right.

just to give you an impression about my experience with altera, quartus nios ..

when we compared the different fpga companies a couple of years ago, while moving from ASIC design on SUNs with Cadence tools, with their tools and components, it was realy interesting that from a component view is doesn't matter which manufacture you choose the price is more or less equal, but the tools and design flow is so different. at the time altera and the "X..." company was like summer and winter. we deceided to go with Altera ( we would be more than mad not to do so ) as the tools and the idea behind sopc builder, avalon switch fabric was like a dream come true.

yes it took a while to get behind the idea of how the tools and the functionality are intended to be used. and there were some pitfalls and of course bad bugs in the past. but what we first noticed was the ease of use of the sopc builder and the component editor. integrating ip functionality inside an sopc ip module and some outside is realy easy and now a days i realy trust sopc builder. we have designs with 9 avalon masters and 12 slaves and the avalon switch fabric does all the abitration. reusability of IPs is easy and now we have a plattform system where all fpga design are based on the same sources with different combinations. even the ability of the nios that the software is compatible between NiosII-e up to -f is used as well as the custom instructions.

desinging custom IPs is also not a problem once you have understood the avalon interface.

the streaming interface is great, no need to think about the data exchange between IPs with different clock cycles to compute the data.

one important thing to mention, at least for me, if you have a question or problem use the MySupport if you do not find the answer here at the forum or the web page.

i realy like the tools and the design flow.

as jake said, take that step and you will notice how fast you can get and will not go back.

Michael

BTW: @Jake could you post a photo .. you in cheerleader outfit ;-)