Intel® Quartus® Prime Standard Edition User Guide: Getting Started

ID 683475
Date 12/16/2019
Public
Document Table of Contents

3.5. Plan for Standard Interfaces

To reduce design iterations and costly design changes, plan for use of standard interfaces in system design. Using standard interfaces ensures compatibility between design blocks from different design teams or vendors. Standard interfaces simplify the interface logic to each design block, and enable individual team members to test their individual design blocks against the specification for the interface protocol to ease system integration.

You can use the Intel® Quartus® Prime Platform Designer system integration tool to use standard interfaces and speed-up system-level integration. Platform Designer components use Avalon® standard interfaces for physical connections, allowing you to connect any logical device (either on-chip or off-chip) that has an Avalon interface. Platform Designer allows you to define system components in a GUI, and then automatically generates the required interconnect logic, along with clock-crossing and width adapters.

The Avalon standard includes two interface types:

  • Avalon Memory-Mapped (Avalon-MM)—allow a component to use an address-mapped read or write protocol that connects master components to slave components.
  • Avalon Streaming (Avalon-ST)—enables point-to-point connections between streaming components that send and receive data using a high-speed, unidirectional system interconnect between source and sink ports.