Hardware requirements about Nios II based System

[Altera_Forum]

Hello everybody, 

 I'm designing a system which has an ALTERA cyclone FPGA and a external processor. My external processor has a Flash Memory to store its software image.  In the FPGA I have some logic functions and the NIOS II .  To minimize the BOM, I want to download the FPGA software (FPGA config + NIOS II software) whith my external processor. The processor's external FLASH will be contain processor soft image + FPGA config + NIOS II soft image.  I have read the documentation, I must use the Passive Serial Mode to achieve that.  MY QUESTION IS : is it possible to download the software image of the NIOS II with the same manner as the FPGA config ? (with my processor) In case of the response of the question is yes, how can I configure SOPC builder in the "NIOS II MORE "CPU" SETTINGS" for the reset address ?  Thanks a lot  Etienne

[Altera_Forum]

Hello Etienne, 

Yes you can download both fpga config (includes nios hw) plus the NIOS software in one operation. IF and only IF, your nios software code is contained entirely in onchip rom/ram - Ram which is loaded as part of the configuration, so its actually completely transparent to you. Just take the image generated by quartus and you are set.   I think its not an issue for cyclone family, but in Stratix be warned that code residing in MRAM blocks will NOT be preloaded during configuration. In earlier releases of nios there were only vague warnings for that, so that problem got me occupied for a while.  Reset address: simply make sure your reset vectors point to your ram/rom.   I have this setup working in a cyclone ep1c12 chip, also with an external cpu, but as this cpu is usb hosted I have no flash on it, just a serial boot eeprom. Instead I have an epcs4 flash which is holding the config code(+nios soft) for the cyclone. This flash is programmable from the cpu to obtain online reconfig.  Hope this gives you some ideas.