Lab Notes - Altera QSys and NIOS II

Link outside GFW : http://hax4.blogspot.com/2011/08/lab-notes-altera-qsys-and-nios-ii.html

From Quartus II V11.0, Altera officially replaced its SOPC builder with the newer QSys design tool. My personal experience with QSys is smooth and every piece falls where they are supposed to be. And here are my two cents:

(1) Add system ID if necessary. And you can always choose to ignore the mismatch of system ID during firmware download if it causes any problem during firmware development. However it is a good practice to have one built-in.

(2) Eclipse is a great tool. Use it as much as you can. However, when sometimes command line also comes handy. Here are a few commands that are useful under NIOS II command shell:

===> (A) download image: nios2-download --cable USB-Blaster -g XXX.elf

===> (B) nios2-terminal

===> (C) system-console

(3) convert from elf to hex. Need this to put boot image in the instruction RAM

===> elf2hex --input=xxx.elf --output=Instruction_RAM.hex --width=32 --verbose --little-endian-mem --base=0x????? --end=0x?????, where "base" and "end" are the addresses specified in the QSys.