Accelerating Nios II Systems with the C2H Compiler Tutorial

Accelerating Nios II Systems with the C2H Compiler Tutorial August 2008, Version 8.0 Tutorial Introduction ®The Nios II C2H Compiler is a powerful tool that generates hardware accelerators for software functions. The C2H Compiler enhances design productivity by allowing you to use a compiler to accelerate software algorithms in hardware. You can quickly prototype hardware functional changes in C, and explore hardware-software design tradeoffs in an efficient, iterative process. The C2H Compiler is well suited to improving computational bandwidth as well as memory throughput. It is possible to achieve substantial performance gains with minimal engineering effort. This tutorial teaches you how to use the C2H Compiler to accelerate a fast Fourier transform (FFT), yielding a large performance gain over a purely software based approach. Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................................1 Prerequisites.............................................................................................................................................................................................. 2 Hardware & Software Requirements ........................................................................................................................................................ 2 Getting the Hardware and ...