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

34.2. Functional Description

The system ID core provides a read-only Avalon® Memory-Mapped ( Avalon® -MM) agent interface. This interface has two 32-bit registers, as shown in the table below. The value of each register is determined at system generation time, and always returns a constant value. You can add only one system ID core to a Platform Designer system, and its name is always sysid.
Table 508.  System ID Core Register Map
Offset Register Name R/W Description
0 id R A unique 32-bit value that defines the system's identification number. It can be either auto-generated or manually assigned.
1 timestamp R A unique 32-bit value that is based on the system generation time. The value is equivalent to the number of seconds after Jan. 1, 1970. Disable it by turning off the Use Live Timestamp option.

There are two basic ways to use the system ID core:

  • Verify the system ID before downloading new software to a system. This method is used by software development tools, such as the Nios® II integrated development environment (IDE). There is little point in downloading a program to a target hardware system, if the program is compiled for different hardware. Therefore, the Nios® II IDE checks that the system ID core in hardware matches the expected system ID of the software before downloading a program to run or debug.
  • Check system ID after reset. If a program is running on hardware other than the expected Platform Designer system, the program may fail to function altogether. If the program does not crash, it can behave erroneously in subtle ways that are difficult to debug. To protect against this case, a program can compare the expected system ID against the system ID core, and report an error if they do not match.