Introduction to the Altera Nios II Soft Processor

This tutorial presents an introduction to Altera’s Nios® II processor, which is a soft processor that can be instantiated on an Altera FPGA device. It describes the basic architecture of Nios II and its instruction set. The Nios II processor and its associated memory and peripheral components are easily instantiated by using Altera’s SOPC Builder or Qsys tool in conjuction with the Quartus® II software.
A full desciption of the Nios II processor is provided in the Nios II Processor Reference Handbook, which is available in the literature section of the Altera web site. Introductions to the SOPC Builder and Qsys tools are given in the tutorials Introduction to the Altera SOPC Builder and Introduction to the Altera Qsys Tool, respectively. Both can be found in the University Program section of the web site.