Nios® V Embedded Processor Design Handbook

ID 726952
Date 4/04/2022
Public

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5.3. Nios® V Processor Booting Methods

There are a few methods to boot up the Nios® V processor in Intel FPGA devices. The methods to boot up Nios® V processor vary according to the flash memory selection and device families.

Table 7.  Supported Flash Memories with Respective Boot Options
Supported Boot Memories Device Nios V Booting Methods Application Runtime Location Boot Copier
Configuration QSPI Flash (for Active Serial configuration) Control block-based devices 4 (with Generic Serial Flash Interface Intel FPGA IP)

Nios V processor application execute-in-place from configuration QSPI flash

Configuration QSPI flash (XIP) + OCRAM/ External RAM (for writable data sections) alt_load() function
Nios V processor application copied from configuration QSPI flash to RAM using boot copier OCRAM/ External RAM GSFI bootloader
SDM-based devices 5 (with Mailbox Client Intel FPGA IP) Nios V processor application copied from configuration QSPI flash to RAM using boot copier OCRAM/ External RAM SDM bootloader

On-chip Memory (OCRAM)

All supported Intel FPGA devices 6 Nios V processor application execute-in-place from OCRAM OCRAM No boot copier required
Figure 12. Nios V Processor Boot Flow
4 Control block-based devices refer to the Intel® Cyclone® 10 GX and Intel® Arria® 10 devices.
5 SDM-based devices refer to the Intel® Stratix® 10 and Intel® Agilex™ devices.
6 The supported Intel FPGA devices refer to the Intel® Cyclone® 10 GX, Intel Arria 10, Intel® Stratix® 10 and Intel® Agilex™ devices.