Altera's Nios development kit for Stratix devices aims to streamline the development process for engineers working on high-bandwidth system designs. The Nios Development Kit Stratix Edition includes version 3.0 of the Nios soft-core embedded processor and a development board with a Stratix EP1S10 device. The kit also comes with Quartus II development software, SOPC Builder system development tool, and a suite of software development tools.

The Stratix development board features the Stratix EP1S10 device, 1Mb of SRAM, 16Mb of SDRAM, 8Mb of flash, a 10/100 Ethernet port, two serial ports, a Mictor connector for software debug, two expansion headers, power supply, and download cable. The flash memory comes contains reference designs and hardware and software tutorials. Stratix devices have densities ranging from 10,570 to 114,140 logic elements (LEs) and up to 10Mbits of RAM. The devices also offer up to 28 digital signal processing (DSP) blocks with up to 224 embedded multipliers.

The Nios soft-core embedded processor is a general-purpose RISC processor that can be combined with user logic and programmed into an Altera FPGA. The processor has a 16-bit instruction set and user-selectable 16- or 32-bit data paths.

The Stratix Edition kit supports software development tools from Accelerated Technology, including the Nucleus real-time operating system (RTOS) and the code|lab Developer Suite.

The Nios Development Kit Stratix Edition is now shipping and is available for $995.

Altera
San Jose, CA
(408) 544-7000
www.altera.com