Altera Nios II C2H Compiler - Manual (Page 8)

1–2 9.1 Altera Corporation
Nios II C2H Compiler User Guide November 2009
Target Audience
Target Audience This user guide assumes you have at least a basic understanding of
hardware design for field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). It also
assumes you are fluent in the C language and you have experience with
software design in C for microprocessors.
The C2H Compiler operates in conjunction with the following Altera
tools:
■ Quartus II software for creating FPGA designs
■ SOPC Builder system integration tool for creating Nios II processor
hardware systems
■ C programming environments for the Nios II processor:
● Nios II integrated development environment (IDE)
● Nios II software build tools
To benefit from this user guide, you do not need to be an expert in these
tools, and you do not need an understanding of any particular Altera
FPGA family. However, at least a basic understanding of each tool is
required to use the C2H Compiler practically.
Introduction This chapter introduces the Nios II C2H Compiler. The sections in this
chapter discuss the features, background, and principles of the
C2H Compiler, and describe the most appropriate types of C code for
acceleration. After reading this chapter, you will understand all the
concepts necessary to begin using the C2H Compiler.
Features
The C2H Compiler is founded on the following premises:
■ ANSI C syntax is sufficient to describe computationally intensive or
memory access-intensive tasks.
■ A C-to-hardware tool must not disrupt existing software and
hardware development flows.
Based on these premises, the C2H Compiler's design methodology
provides the following features:
■ ANSI C compliance – The C2H Compiler operates on plain ANSI C
code, and supports most C constructs, including pointers, arrays,
structures, global and local variables, loops, and subfunction calls.
The C2H Compiler does not require special syntax or library
functions to specify the structure of the hardware. Unsupported
ANSI C constructs are documented.