Embedded Processors
79
covered and the reader is encouraged to experiment with the offer-
ings from the FPGA vendors to see which suits their application
the best.
In any soft core development system there are several key func-
tions that are required to make the process easy to implement. The
first is the system building function. This enables a core to be
designed into a hardware system that includes memory modules,
control functions, Direct Memory Access (DMA) functions, data
interfaces and interrupts. The second is the choice of processor
types to implement. A basic NIOS II or similar embedded core
will typically have a performance in the region of ...