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

33.7.3. Software Description

The software for the various example designs is very similar. For example, the difference between the software for the VIC Basic example and the software for the IIC example is the printf() call that generates the output to the terminal.

All of the software performs the following steps:

  1. Configures the timer used for measurement purposes
  2. Registers an interrupt service routine (ISR)
  3. Sets a global variable to 0xfeedface
  4. Starts the performance counter to measure the interrupt time
  5. Waits for the ISR to set the global variable to 0xfacefeed
  6. Stops the performance counter and computes the interrupt time

The VIC Daisy-Chain example performs the measurement for both VICs connected in the daisy chain, shown in Figure 146.

In all these design examples, the GCC compiler in Nios® II SBT tool is set to optimization level 2. Also, some settings are modified during BSP generation in order to reduce the code size. All these setting can be found in the create-this-bsp script included in the design example. Note that the number of clock cycles shows in these design examples will be differ from this document if the setting is different.

For details about how the VIC Table-Resident example code works, refer to “Positioning the ISR in the Vector Table”. For details about performance counter usage in the example software, refer to “Latency Measurement with the Performance Counter”.

VIC Example