Specifications

Altera Corporation 1–1
October 2007
Nios II Hardware
Development
Introduction
This tutorial introduces you to the system development flow for the
Nios II processor. This tutorial is a good starting point if you are new to
the Nios II processor or the general concept of building embedded
systems in FPGAs. In this tutorial you build a Nios II hardware system
and create a software program to run on the Nios II system.
Building embedded systems in FPGAs is a broad subject, involving
system requirements analysis, hardware design tasks, and software
design tasks. This tutorial guides you through the basics of each topic,
with special focus on the hardware design steps. Where appropriate, the
tutorial refers you to further documentation for greater detail.
f If you are interested only in software development for the Nios II
processor, see the Software Development Tutorial available in the Nios II
IDE help system.
When you complete this tutorial, you will understand the Nios II system
development flow, and you will be able to create your own custom Nios II
system.
Example Design
The example design you build in this tutorial demonstrates a small
Nios II system for control applications, which displays character I/O
output and blinks LEDs in a binary counting pattern. This Nios II system
can also communicate with a host computer, allowing the host computer
to control logic inside the FPGA.
The example Nios II system contains the following:
■ Nios II/s processor core
■ On-chip memory
■ Timer
■ JTAG UART
■ 8-bit parallel I/O (PIO) pins to control LEDs
■ System identification component