Nios II and EP2C5T144C8

[Altera_Forum]

Hi, 

 I am looking to use NIOS II on an FPGA. The FPGA I have is the Altera EP2C5T144C8.  I am a bit confused whether it is actually possible to use NIOS II with this FPGA.   According to the Nios II hardware development tutorial, the FPGA needs to have 50 M4K memory blocks to run Nios II. However the EP2C5T144C8 only has 26. So initially I thought it wouldn't be possible to use Nios II on the EP2C5T.  Yet online there are some EP2C5T boards with Nios II on them for sale.  Is it possible to set NIOS II on this FPGA?  Best regards,  Jennifer

[Altera_Forum]

--- Quote Start ---  Hi,  I am looking to use NIOS II on an FPGA. The FPGA I have is the Altera EP2C5T144C8.  I am a bit confused whether it is actually possible to use NIOS II with this FPGA.   According to the Nios II hardware development tutorial, the FPGA needs to have 50 M4K memory blocks to run Nios II. However the EP2C5T144C8 only has 26. So initially I thought it wouldn't be possible to use Nios II on the EP2C5T.  Yet online there are some EP2C5T boards with Nios II on them for sale.  Is it possible to set NIOS II on this FPGA?  Best regards,  Jennifer  --- Quote End ---    Very small fpga but you can try

[Altera_Forum]

I also have a cheap development kit based on the same part EP2C5T144C8, and I tried to compile a simple project with few stuffs (CPU/JTAG/UART/PIO/CLK/...) and compilation resulted in an error of insufficient M4K blocks to fit within, having exceeded in 115%, what means that total memory blocks required were 30 ( just 4 units more than available on core ). I used the Quartus2 revision 13.0, the last one which supports the Cyclone II family. 

 The only reason that I can guess to explain the divergence on resources required not matching the 50 M4K blocks informed on product specifications is that I used the Web edition along with the economic variant /e of the core. It is clear that this core in particular is not suited to work with the Nios2 core, unless for very limited applications.

[Altera_Forum]

Thank you for your answers. I'll try with the economic version, and if needed I'll change FPGA.