The Research And Development Of SOPC Application Platform Based On NiosⅡ Processor

With the innovation and development of the microelectronic technology and the semiconductor industry, the integration level and technological level of integrated circuit have been enhanced significantly, which makes it possible to integrate a system on a semiconductor chip. Thus, a new era of SOC (system on a chip) in digital technology has come. However, it is still difficult for engineers to conduct SOC design in laboratory due to the limit of manufacturing technique and experimental conditions.SOPC is the a solution to system on programmable chip provided by Altera Corporation, which integrates CPU, memory, I/O connection, the DSP module, low voltage difference technology (LVDS), the clock data restores technical (CDR) , phase-locked loop(PPL)and other modules that are needed in system designing on a piece of FPGA to constitute a programmable SOC. The Nios embedded processor, a Soft Core CPU made by the FPGA production manufacturer Altera Corporation, is a kind of general RISC embedded CPU flexibly customized. Nios, provided to the user by Soft Core, is used to integrate SOPC and optimize FPGA of Altera Corporation. According to the design request, the user can build NiosⅡand its periphery system by using QuartusⅡand SOPC Builder to have the embedded system satisfy their system designing requests in the aspects like hardware configuration, functional characteristics and resource occupation.Moreover, the embedded SOPC system designing based on NiosⅡSoft Core can be installed with proprietary hardware accelerator by giving instruction in order to process the programming that contains algorithm model effectively and then dispose corresponding embedded system to FPGA by making use of its reconfigurability so that the SOPC system can work with high speed and effectiveness.SOPC reached a kind of organic combination in its application of theories and knowledge constitution. Concerned with the first floor hardware system and software design, the SOPC technology enabled the exploiter to display their own creativity and imagination both in the synthesis and construction of the software and hardware system so that they could optimize their design on all levels and from various aspects. SOPC can be divided into the hardware design and the software design on the level of design; It is a typical top-down flow; It uses computer—the mainstream technology of the scientific research and development—so widely and deeply that the designers are able to realize the maximum optimization on this platform. Seen from the tendency of the future electronic system design, the SOPC technology has its expansibility and foresightedness.Since the system is flexible in design, reducible, expandable, upgradeable and programmable both in the software and hardware system, the circuit designed has been optimized in many aspects like scale, reliability, volume, power loss, listing cycle, development cost, product maintenance and hardware upgrades. Thus, it is welcomed by most electronic engineers.This article has desighed a SOPC platform which suits the professional college student to study through discussion based on Altera Corporation's FPGA embedded processor NiosⅡessence pronciple of work ,SOPC software and hardware design technology,and unifies the professional colleges student's characteristic. The most major characteristic of this platform is the user can completes the SOPC correlation study and the research through the simple design or the direct transfer way.