Nios® II Processor Reference Guide

ID 683836
Date 8/28/2023
Public
Document Table of Contents

2.6.3.2. Effective Use of Tightly-Coupled Memory

A system can use tightly-coupled memory to achieve maximum performance for accessing a specific section of code or data. For example, interrupt-intensive applications can place exception handler code into a tightly-coupled memory to minimize interrupt latency. Similarly, compute-intensive digital signal processing (DSP) applications can place data buffers into tightly-coupled memory for the fastest possible data access.

If the application’s memory requirements are small enough to fit entirely on chip, it is possible to use tightly-coupled memory exclusively for code and data. Larger applications must selectively choose what to include in tightly-coupled memory to maximize the cost-performance trade-off.