What Customers & Industry Analysts Are Saying about the Nios & Nios II Embedded ProcessorsHirschmann"Cyclone™Â FPGAs and the Nios® processor play a crucial role in our Hybrid Car-TV receiver that combines analog and digital video broadcast reception capability. Cyclone FPGAs provide us with an affordable solution for implementing the DSP functions required for TV reception. The Nios processor enabled us to avoid using an off-the-shelf processor, which saves us development cost, board space, and engineering time. Further, Altera's SOPC Builder enabled us to easily construct the exact Nios processor we needed to perform antenna control functions, and with the Nios II processor, we look forward to achieving even greater performance and improved resource efficiency." Dr. Dirk Wendt
Director of Development Crescendo Networks "Altera's Nios processors and Stratix® FPGAs are at the very heart of our Maestro platform, delivering the core functionality that enables it to provide unprecedented data center functionality. We have been evaluating the Nios II processor for some time, and even in its pre-released form, it is a very impressive offering, providing 2X the performance in our product and considerable resource savings. We plan to integrate Nios II processors into Maestro as soon as possible, as well as Stratix II FPGAs, both of which will boost Maestro's processing speed and extend our performance advantage even further." Steve Elston
President, Â Americas Wireless Reading Systems "The Nios II processor provides substantially better resource utilization than its predecessor, which enables us to add functionality to the existing Cyclone FPGA in our RECAPS wireless reading solution without incurring hardware re-spin costs. Further, the Nios II integrated development environment (IDE) delivers every element we could hope for, and will reduce our software engineering time. By enabling us to add features and support RECAPs with greater efficiency, the Nios II processor provides us with the means to deliver greater value to our customers while keeping our costs to a minimum." Martin Forsberg Lie
Software Architect Alcatel Optical Multi-Service Node (OMSN) Lab"We have found the Nios processor to be a powerful, reliable platform for developing and implementing complex algorithms. The combination of microprocessor functionality and programmable logic allows designers to explore the optimum implementation of digital functions." Santo Maggio
Project Leader Ultra Data"Our UD3000 HD video decoder solution requires the highest performance processing, the flexibility to add custom instructions, and minimal resource utilization. Altera's Nios II processor is an ideal fit for all of those requirements. To achieve the optimal video decode performance, Ultra Data uses multiple Nios II processors implemented in a Stratix FPGA, and we look forward to using Stratix II devices to achieve even greater performance. Altera's complete solution, including the Stratix Professional Edition of the Nios Development Kit, has been invaluable in allowing us to demonstrate our technology." Jonah Probell
Founder and Principal Design Engineer Johnson Controls, Inc."For our new automotive audio video system, we have selected Altera's FPGAs because their performance, quality, and temperature specifications meet our automotive requirements. The flexibility and programmability of Altera's devices combined with its powerful Nios embedded processor provide us with the perfect solution for developing new products." Francois Lepinette
Product Engineering Manager Intevac “Replacing an off-the-shelf DSP processor allowed us to reduce five separate boards of components to a single board occupied mainly by a Cyclone device running an embedded Nios processor. The Altera-based approach reduced our component costs by at least 20 percent and decreased our power consumption to a fifth of what it had been. In addition, we are enjoying lower manufacturing costs and higher product reliability due to much simpler product architecture. These results, combined with the excellent support we are getting from our Altera® distributor, Arrow Electronics, confirm that we made best choice by going with Altera.†David Main
Engineering Group Manager Wireless Reading Systems"Offering a compact, low-cost solution is critical to the success of our product. Choosing an Altera programmable solution allowed us to replace a competitive FPGA and an off-the-shelf processor with a single Cyclone FPGA hosting a Nios processor at one-fifth the cost. In addition, the Altera solution provided us with greater integration, a smaller overall form factor, lower power consumption, and flexibility that was not possible in the prior solution." Martin Forsberg Lie
Software Architect Sigma Instruments"The low-cost combination of Nios processors in Cyclone devices allows us to integrate all of our needed processor and peripheral functions into a single Altera device, saving engineering time and board space. The Altera solution enables us to avoid problems with component obsolescence, since our product lifecycles are fairly long. Going forward, we intend to replace all of our microprocessor designs with a Nios processor in a Cyclone device." George Diehl
Engineering Manager Finisar Corporation"The implementation of Nios processors in Stratix FPGAs offers a powerful processor and additional interface IP modules. This significantly increases the time available to develop new features in our products. The Stratix edition of the Nios Development Kit will allow us to accelerate our product development and reap the significant time-to-market benefits of Altera's solutions." Jayne Hahin
Senior Product Development Engineer BioMeridian"We had previously used off-the-shelf processors in our designs, but we have since switched to the Nios processor for greater integration, more flexibility, and its ease-of-use. Currently, we are using the Nios processor in our MSAS-Professional and MSAS-Partner products. These products are battery powered, which means reducing power consumption was a priority. The ability to add custom instructions to the Nios processor helped us achieve high data throughput while keeping the clock speed low enough to reduce power usage by 66 percent." Douglas Horne
Vice President
Research and Development Lucent Technologies Optical Networking"We believe the Altera Nios 32-bit soft core processor for programmable logic offers both the flexibility and performance we need for our LambdaRouter™ All Optical Switch (AOS). We are always looking for suppliers that help us enhance the capabilities of our next-generation optical products, enabling us to deliver high-performance and cost-effective systems to our customers." Mark Gruensfelder
Technical Manager Peak NDT Ltd“Altera’s Nios processor has played a key part in our MicroPulse 4 range of products. The flexibility of the processor and ease-of-use of the development tools allowed us to significantly reduce development time. Altera programmable devices have played a major role in the MicroPulse products for many years. The development of the Nios soft embedded processor means Altera will have that role for many more. We are looking forward to enhancing our design capability with the large Stratix devices and advanced debug tools included with the Nios Development Kit, Stratix Professional Edition.†Graham Vesey
Electronic Development Manager Alcatel Optical Multi-Service Node (OMSN) Lab"By using the Nios processor, we reduced our development time, shortened our time-to-market, and improved our capability to update our product in the field. As a result, most of our future programmable logic designs include the Nios processor, and we eagerly anticipate the expanded functionality in Nios 2.0." Paolo Taina
Group Leader Celestica"As a world leader in electronics manufacturing systems (EMS), Celestica must respond to the evolving needs of its customers. The ability to produce prototypes for our clients and rapidly modify the product based on changing customer requirements is critical. For a project involving a wireless Bluetooth printer interface, Celestica needed an integrated processor with the performance to handle complex, nested code. The Nios processor delivered the one-chip solution and performance that we needed.
"The standard, GNU C compiler included with the Nios Development Kit made it extremely easy to port our system to Nios. In our design which implements a wireless Bluetooth interface for printers, the same code executes on both the host PC and the embedded Nios processor. My team was able to cross-compile the PC's source code for the Nios processor, with minor assembly modifications." Randy Clark
Project Manager Telena Communications"The development board included with the Nios Development Kit allowed us to prototype our source code before committing to embedding the Nios processor core into our system. In the end, not only did we decide to go with the Nios processor; the Nios development board became an integral part of our first system prototype. It's a simple feature, but the LCD display was a real 'cool factor' on the development board. Using simple printf() statements, our system could easily display status messages to the outside world.
"For Telena's next generation product that integrates ATM and packet-over-SONET capabilities, we originally considered the Nios processor in hopes of off-loading tasks from the main, external CPU. We typically handle L2 and L3 processing in the Altera PLD, and it seemed natural to integrate a Nios CPU alongside these functions. The external CPU performance is limited by bus throughput, while the Altera PLD architecture is excellent at fast data stream processing. In future products, we plan to implement more and more processing functions in a Nios processor inside the Altera PLD." Tony Porras
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder PC2 Consulting"By optimizing the Nios processor for their Stratix devices, Altera makes a strong case for the widespread use of soft embedded core processors in PLDs, especially when compared to its initial release almost two years ago. The higher performance, additional memory resources, and embedded DSP blocks available with Stratix devices will increase the application space that can use Altera's Nios soft core embedded processor, and strengthen the already compelling reason for embedded designers to consider the use of PLD-based processors." Cary D. Snyder
Analyst OmniWerks"We chose Altera's Nios processor for our new secure wireless OmniStation 802.11b for two reasons. First and foremost, the combination of a soft embedded core microprocessor and SOPC Builder, along with our IP, lets us build custom systems that deliver unmatched ease-of-use and flexibility to our customers. Second, we are able to immediately take advantage of Altera's new device families providing ever-increasing performance and value to our customers." John Yin
Chief Technology Officer
IRIS Technologies
"Using SOPC Builder, we were able to easily embed a Nios embedded processor into Altera FPGAs that perfectly matched our needs, profiling and benchmarking various algorithms for network route processing and forwarding, The Nios processor gave us the flexibility to implement the algorithms in software, while the SOPC Builder tool allowed our designers to easily connect custom logic and implement performance-critical tasks in hardware." Gautam Kavipurapu
Chief Technical Officer and Founder
Microprocessor Report
"The ability to deploy multiple processors on very low-cost FPGAs will be useful in new applications whose workloads can be distributed across several engines. Altera's Nios processor and soft DSP cores turn out to be especially attractive because they deliver a custom solution and remain royalty-free." Max Baron
Principal Analyst
(commenting on using Nios processors in Cyclone FPGAs) | 
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