Peripherals and Intellectual Property Overview
Embedded systems are defined by their peripheral set—getting the right set is critical to your embedded design. A peripheral set comprises not only the intellectual property (IP) cores but also their related software drivers. Altera provides a wide selection of peripherals and software drivers to meet your embedded needs.
Hardware Peripherals
Simply drag and drop from a menu of available peripheral components to add them to your system (refer to Figure 1). Altera provides a diverse portfolio of IP cores needed for most embedded applications, including communication, memory controller, and device interface IP cores. Additionally, you can create and import your own IP cores to enable the same drag-and-drop reuse. Learn more about free evaluation of IP cores.
Figure 1. Custom Nios II Embedded Processor Solution
Software Drivers
Altera provides a complete set of peripheral device drivers and even generates a custom board support package automatically to accelerate your software development effort.
- Hardware Abstraction Layer—Increase your productivity by building your applications on top of the Nios II Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). The HAL is a well defined software layer that forms a clear distinction between application and device-level software (refer to Figure 2). The HAL also provides services such as file descriptors, I/O control, and buffering, which are required by the ANSI C library functions, so that your HAL driver does not need to provide these functions. Learn about the HAL System Library (PDF).
- Board support package—The Nios IDE automatically generates a complete board support package including drivers for the peripherals in your system. Learn about the HAL System Library (PDF).
- Custom drivers—Create your own custom drivers on top of the HAL layer by leveraging the HAL API using a predefined and well documented driver development procedure. This modular approach promotes consistent, portable, and reusable code. Download Developing Device Drivers for the HAL (PDF).
- Reference designs—Get started quickly designing your own applications with predefined reference designs and templates.
Figure 2. Nios II Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL)
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Notes:
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SPI = serial peripheral interface
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DMA = direct memory access
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CFI = common flash interface
Embedded Software Partners
Get operating systems, network stacks, file systems, graphics libraries, USB stacks, debuggers, compilers, and more from industry-leading software partners so you can significantly reduce your development cycle and maximize code reusability. Learn more about embedded software partners.
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