Embedded Peripherals IP User Guide

ID 683130
Date 10/24/2025
Public
Document Table of Contents
1. Introduction 2. Avalon® -ST Serial Peripheral Interface Core 3. SPI Core 4. SPI Agent/JTAG to Avalon® Host Bridge Cores 5. Intel eSPI Agent Core 6. eSPI to LPC Bridge Core 7. Ethernet MDIO Core 8. Intel FPGA 16550 Compatible UART Core 9. UART Core 10. Lightweight UART Core 11. JTAG UART Core 12. Intel FPGA Avalon® Mailbox Core 13. Intel FPGA Avalon® Mutex Core 14. Intel FPGA Avalon® I2C (Host) Core 15. Intel FPGA I2C Agent to Avalon® -MM Host Bridge Core 16. EPCS/EPCQA Serial Flash Controller Core 17. Intel FPGA Serial Flash Controller Core 18. Intel FPGA Serial Flash Controller II Core 19. Intel FPGA Generic QUAD SPI Controller Core 20. Intel FPGA Generic QUAD SPI Controller II Core 21. Interval Timer Core 22. Intel FPGA Avalon FIFO Memory Core 23. On-Chip Memory (RAM and ROM) Intel FPGA IP 24. On-Chip Memory II (RAM or ROM) Intel FPGA IP 25. PIO Core 26. PLL Cores 27. DMA Controller Core 28. Modular Scatter-Gather DMA Core 29. Scatter-Gather DMA Controller Core 30. Video Sync Generator and Pixel Converter Cores 31. Intel FPGA Interrupt Latency Counter Core 32. Performance Counter Unit Core 33. Vectored Interrupt Controller Core 34. System ID Peripheral Core 35. Intel FPGA GMII to RGMII Converter Core 36. HPS GMII to RGMII Adapter IP 37. Intel FPGA MII to RMII Converter Core 38. HPS GMII to TSE 1000BASE-X/SGMII PCS Bridge Core IP 39. Intel FPGA HPS EMAC to Multi-rate PHY GMII Adapter Core 40. Intel FPGA MSI to GIC Generator Core 41. Cache Coherency Translator IP 42. Altera ACE5-Lite Cache Coherency Translator

27.1. Core Overview

The direct memory access (DMA) controller core with Avalon® interface performs bulk data transfers, reading data from a source address range and writing the data to a different address range. An Avalon® Memory-Mapped ( Avalon® -MM) host peripheral, such as a CPU, can offload memory transfer tasks to the DMA controller. While the DMA controller performs memory transfers, the host is free to perform other tasks in parallel.

The DMA controller transfers data as efficiently as possible, reading and writing data at the maximum pace allowed by the source or destination. The DMA controller is capable of performing Avalon® transfers with flow control, enabling it to automatically transfer data to or from a slow peripheral with flow control (for example, UART), at the maximum pace allowed by the peripheral.

Instantiating the DMA controller in Platform Designer creates one agent port and two host ports. You must specify which agent peripherals can be accessed by the read and write host ports. Likewise, you must specify which other host peripheral(s) can access the DMA control port and initiate DMA transactions. The DMA controller does not export any signals to the top level of the system module.
Note: While instantiating the DMA controller in the hierarchical subsystem, add an Avalon® -MM pipeline bridge in front of the exported host interface of the DMA controller in the subsystem. This will allow you to configure the bus width of the pipeline bridge to match the agent address bus.

For the Nios® II and Nios® V processors, device drivers are provided in the HAL system library. See the Software Programming Model section for details of HAL support.