With the Altera Nios II embedded processor, you as the system designer can accelerate time-critical software algorithms by adding custom instructions to the Nios II processor instruction set. Using custom instructions, you can reduce a complex sequence of standard instructions to a single instruction implemented in hardware. You can use this feature for a variety of applications, for example, to optimize software inner loops for digital signal processing (DSP), packet header processing, and computation-intensive applications. The Nios II configuration wizard, part of the Quartus® II software’s SOPC Builder, provides a graphical user interface (GUI) used to add up to 256 custom instructions to the Nios II processor