Mixed SW/HW project

Hi Andrew,

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I did search on this forum for my questions and it seems that I need to use

NIOS/SOPC builder to do a mixed SW/HW project.

To briefly explain what my project does, we are implementing a digital alarm clock on the FPGA board and trying to display the clock on the C GUI program on the computer. So we basically need a general I/O b/w our C program and the verilog.

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No, its not necessary to use the NIOS processor. You have two options, namely

- Use the NIOS: If you use NIOS, you would need to program an application in C which runs on NIOS. This would communicate with the PC and implement the clock.

- Do NOT use NIOS: In this case you would need to implement the clock and the interface in hardware using Verilog/VHDL.

To communicate between PC and the FPGA, you can either use the RS-232 port on the DE2 board (the simplest option), or the USB, etc. You can then decide on a protocol to send the clock data. This protocol would be known by the C GUI running on the PC and the custom clock hardware/NIOS running on the FPGA.

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Second, we are using custom c libraries for our program and we would like to know whether we can use thses libraries in NIOS/SOPC.

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As the entities running on the PC and the FPGA would be completely independent of each other. They would only be sharing the knowledge of the common protocol. Hence, this is of no concern.

Hope it helps!