Video and Image Processing Suite User Guide

ID 683416
Date 4/04/2022
Public
Document Table of Contents

27.1. HAL Device Drivers for Nios II SBT

To facilitate implementing the control mechanism and to access other registers, the VIP IP cores that permit run-time control come with a device driver.

This VIP driver is a software component that interfaces the core to the Nios II hardware abstraction layer (HAL). The VIP driver provides a high-level C++ application programming interface (API) that abstracts away the details of the register map of each VIP IP core and makes the user-control code more readable. This API is:

  • Extensible—Using the C++ inheritance mechanism, it is easy to augment the API of existing cores or create classes for custom VIP IP cores.
  • Optional—If the drivers are not required or you prefer to write your own light-weight implementation, simply disable the drivers with the Board Support Package (BSP) editor to remove them from the HAL to reduce the Nios II code footprint.
  • Subject to minor changes in future releases—Download the VIP design examples from the Design Store for examples and refer to the documented header files that are automatically generated by the Nios II SBT in the HAL/inc directory for the full API.