CHAPTER 10

NIOS II SYSTEM DERIVATION AND LOW-LEVEL ACCESS

A Nios II-based system consists of customized hardware and software. Altera's SOPC Builder is used to configure the processor and I/O peripherals and its Nios II EDS platform is used to develop software. In this chapter, we use a simple flashing-LED system as a tutorial to demonstrate the process, with emphasis on the hardware and software interface and basic coding techniques to access low-level I/O peripherals.

10.1 DEVELOPMENT FLOW REVISITED

The basic Nios II-based development process is discussed in Section 1.3.1 and the flow is repeated in Figure 10.1.

10.1.1 Hardware development

We examine the hardware development (the left branch of the flow) in Part I and discuss the design of various types of circuits. As the complexity of systems grows, it becomes difficult and time consuming to construct everything from scratch. One way to ease the problem is to use pre-designed modules, either from previous projects or other parties. Since the modules are usually intellectual property of the designing party, they are known as IP cores (intellectual property cores). An IP core can be delivered in high-level HDL codes, which is known as a soft core, or in a detailed transistor-level layout, which is known as a hard core.

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Figure 10.1 Development flow of a system with Nios II.

To facilitate the embedded system design, Altera provides ...

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