Procedures

Commands

See Also

SOPC Builder provides a standardized, graphical environment for creating system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) designs which are composed of components such as CPUs, memory interfaces, standard peripherals, and user-defined peripherals. After starting SOPC Builder, you can select and customize the individual components and interfaces of your system module. SOPC Builder combines these components and generates a single system module that instantiates these components, and automatically generates the necessary bus logic to connect them together.

You can use SOPC Builder to construct embedded microprocessor systems that include CPUs, memory interfaces, and I/O peripherals; however, you can also generate dataflow systems that do not include a CPU. SOPC Builder allows you to specify bus topologies with multiple masters and slaves.

Examples of SOPC Builder library components include the following:

• Processors, such as the Excalibur^™ embedded processor stripe or the Nios^® processor
• Intellectual property (IP) and standard peripherals
• On-chip RAM or ROM, and interfaces to off-chip memory
• Communications peripherals
• Bus bridges and interfaces
• Digital signal processing (DSP) and communications cores
• Software
• OS/RTOS kernels

SOPC Builder can also import or provide an interface to user-defined blocks of logic that are connected to the system as custom peripherals.

Once the system components have been specified, SOPC Builder automatically generates some or all of the following:

• Bus logic, including multi-master arbitration, that connects the components together, and interfaces to logic and/or memory outside the system module
• A synthesized netlist of the entire system module
• Verilog Design Files (.v) and/or VHDL Design Files (.vhd) describing the system, which can be used as a simulation model
• A test bench and ModelSim^® project environment to simulate the custom system
• A custom library of software routines necessary for a processor to access the peripherals available in the system, which accelerates the task of software creation

This output from SOPC Builder accelerates the system customization, verification, and software generation phases of system design.

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