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HPS Gbit PHY access from FPGA

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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hi, 

 

I have been thinking of purchasing the sockit (http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?language=english&categoryno=167&no=816) board and want to make sure it fits my needs. 

I can see the Gbit PHY is connected to the HPS. Is it possible to use this PHY from a Nios? 

 

thanks!
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
555 Views

Hi, 

 

any update on that?...i am planning to purchase Arrow SocKit board and also concerned about accessing peripherals connected to HPS from FPGA side, particularly Gbit PHY. 

 

thanks
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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I'm a beginner at this myself, but so far from what I've gathered, you wouldn't want to access the Ethernet PHY from the FPGA side. The Ethernet MAC is a SOC element connected to the ARM cores. The MAC controls the PHY. If you want to send/receive data over Ethernet, you should write FPGA code to place/get your data into memory. You would then trigger an interrupt to the ARM. It then runs the TCP/IP stack. Implementing Ethernet in FPGA code takes a lot of resources. You have a perfectly good Ethernet in the processor side.

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