The Asynchronous Control System Design Of LED Display Based On Nios Softcore

Nios processor is a type of soft-core processor released by ALTERA Inc. in 2000. Together with the software package-Quartus II and SOPC Builder, this kind of processor not only improves the implementation of SOPC (System on Programmable Chip) design which leads the electronics system development trend toward software design, but also makes the system upgrade no longer difficult.As a new kind of display media, LED display has been widely used in many industrial areas because of its long life, highlight brightness and convenience of operation. However, for different requirements, the corresponding LED display systems can hardly be upgraded unless there is one or some uniform solution for LED display control system. According to this, the paper described a design based on Nios soft-core processor, which integrates the processor, the peripheral interface controller and some hardware functions into a single FPGA chip. In this way, different system requirements can easily be satisfied by certain FPGA configuration, and some special processor systems can also be designed to meet some specific desires, that mostly make use of FPGA resource.A set of LED asynchronous display control system has been designed in this paper, which takes the advantages of Nios soft-core in the idea described before. The paper discusses the structure characteristics of LED display, Nios processor and Avalon Bus, SOPC design flow and development tools. The two main aspects of the system-Nios system, hardware logic design-are particularly discussed. The circuit has been tailored and the related software has been debugged on the existing basis. Last but not least, the recent development of SOPC and available solutions is mentioned in the paper.