help to add features to DE2-115 tutorials

Hi all,

I'm completely new in the world of FPGA design
and I want to make a small project.
The idea is the choose one tutorial made by altera (DE2-115) (I'm interesting by the web server tutorial)
and try to enhance the design (adding nios2 processor or other devices) and compare
with the original one in term of execution time and so on ...
I don't know if it's good idea to start or no !
if so please any suggestions how to do it, especially how to find the part of the design that should be enhanced
if no please any other suggestions !

thanks in advance to this great community !

jhon.c said:

I'm completely new in the world of FPGA design
and I want to make a small project.

Click to expand...

In that case it may be a better idea to first blink a led, or make an UART, or do a counter + segment display or something. That is generally easier that mucking about with softcore mcu's. After you get that working you will inevitably have learned some things you were not expecting. After you get that to work you can always hop back to your plan to use a nios2 processor.

You may want to pickup a copy of Chu's new text:

Embedded SoPC Design with Nios II Processor and Verilog Examples


BigDog

Thank for your suggestions
but when I said I'm new that means I only can made a tutorial from altera
I never designer my own project
for my undergraduate studies I should design a digital circuit using verilog and altera fpga
so it should be a little bit interesting then altera's tutorial ,but no so complicated just to learn basics digital design.

any other's suggestions ?

I suggested the super duper almost insultingly simple stuff first, because you are bound to run into boring mundane issues like "how does this button in altera work" and "how do I get the design actually running on my hardware". If you have already done that in the past, then sorry, you can ignore the suggestions. If this really your first contact with fpga's ever then doing the boring basics first might actually save you time in your hurry to get to the good stuff. The stupid mundane "what does this button do" is more easily figured out with a trivial example like a counter + some blinkie leds. Doing something with a softcore is bound to be more tricky. Besides, you can always quickly do the boring led blinkie and then quickly get to your intended nios2 fun.

Or if you already have the nios2 working on hardware, then sure, you can skip the boring stuff and see what you can learn by extending the design. Depends really on what you intend to do + what you want to learn.

mrflibble said:

Or if you already have the nios2 working on hardware, then sure, you can skip the boring stuff and see what you can learn by extending the design. Depends really on what you intend to do + what you want to learn.

Click to expand...

Hi !

my idea is to analyse a project and find the bottlenecks in hardware or software and try to modify it by adding a processor , analyse the software part(divide the software in two processor ) ... after that I compare the 2 design , but I don't know how to proceed and how to find those bottlenecks , with altera tools or with others tools

thanks again

After you've mastered the basics.

A few NIOS II tutorials which maybe of interest:

uClinux Tutorial Altera NIOS2

Nios II Linux Tutorial

Introduction to the Altera Nios II Soft Processor

Designing a NIOS II System from Scratch

BigDog

Hi all,
Thanks for all suggestions especially for those tutorials
I still have another question please.
I want to enhance the webserver tutorial provided by altera
from what I read in this forum there are some part in the software part that can be implemented in hardware to increase the performance
any idea about that ?

and generally speaking how can I identify the part of a design
(hardware and software ) that should be modified to get better performance

thank you very much and sorry for these basic questions !

Hi ,

I find an interesting tutorial from altera Nios II Ethernet Acceleration Design Example