AN 717: Nios II Gen2 Hardware Development Tutorial

ID 683615
Date 9/22/2014
Public
Document Table of Contents

1.5.2. Analyze System Requirements

The system requirements are derived from the following goals of the tutorial design example:

  • Demonstrate a simple processor system that you can use for control applications.
  • Build a practical, real-world system, while providing an educational experience.
  • Demonstrate the most common and effective techniques to build practical, custom systems.
  • Build a system that works on any board with an FPGA. The entire system must use only on-chip resources, and not rely on the target board.
  • The design should conserve on-chip logic and memory resources so it can fit in a wide range of target FPGAs.

These goals lead to the following design decisions:

  • The system uses only the following inputs and outputs:
    • One clock input, which can be any constant frequency.
    • Eight optional outputs to control LEDs on the target board.
  • The design uses the following components:
    • /f core with 2 KB of instruction cache with static branch prediction
    • 20 KB of on-chip memory
    • Timer
    • JTAG UART
    • Eight output-only parallel I/O (PIO) pins
    • System ID component