We are probably going to construct a new controller board using an Altera FPGA and implement a NIOS/2 processor that will run Linux. (We do consider BlackFin, too, but supposedly Altera will win.) On the long run we will want to do Pascal software for that controller using FPC. Is there anybody who is interested in joining in a project doing a NIOS FPC compiler ?

-Michael

What is the architecture of NIOS/2 ? Something standard or it has it's own design for opcodes, registers, etc?

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote

What is the architecture of NIOS/2 ? Something standard or it has it's own design for opcodes, registers, etc?

It's a propriety design of Altera's and seems a little bit similar to ARM.

The NIOS is a very standard RISK processor with load/store architecture (like ARM: there are only some dedicated instructions that can access the memory)

all arithmetics is done within the registers. <RA=RB+RC> or can use a 16 Bit immediate.

The return value of a call is in a dedicated register

It has 32 general purpose registers and no dedicated address registers. It accesses 2 GB of Memory.
It can be configured is several ways (1, 5 or 6 stage pipeline, with our without hardware mult, div, and other instructions

You can d/l the data sheet here:

http://www.altera.com/literature/lit-nio2.jsp

or directly at

http://www.altera.com/literature/hb/nios2/n2cpu_nii5v1.pdf

Look here for the NIOS Linux support:
go to http://www.niosforum.com/
-> Forum
create an account

after that you can d/l a Linux distribution including Eclipse based development tools
(that need a working (and fitting version of the) Altera NIOS development tools that can be loaded here:

ftp://ftp.altera.com/outgoing/release/quartusii_60_pc.zip ftp://ftp.altera.com/outgoing/release/megacore_lib_60_pc.zip ftp://ftp.altera.com/outgoing/release/niosii_60_eval_pc.exe ftp://ftp.altera.com/outgoing/release/quartusii_60_sp1_pc.exe

The Altera tools can be used in a "Web edition" testing mode for free. To create a sell product to be distributed you need an appropriate license.

-Michael