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aakkü's avatar
aakkü
Icon for Occasional Contributor rankOccasional Contributor
7 years ago

Coniguring FPGA devices over USB

Hello, I am in the process of selecting FPGA device for the product I am desingning. Product is a data acquisition system that collects data from ADCs and sends it to an host computer via USB interf...
JOHI's avatar
JOHI
Icon for Contributor rankContributor
7 years ago

​Hello,

The majority of the intel FPGA's support NIOS2. With this technology you can implement a micro-processor & ram in the FPGA fabric.

The Nios2 configuration & fpga configuration can be stored in an eprom.

The nice thing about this configuration is that you can use the processor to reconfigure the eprom while it is operating hence doing a firmware upgrade.

USB can be realised with a cypress processor.

Should you be interested in a board that has all the hardware you need to do a feasability test for your job (ADC + EPROM + FPGA + USB controller) look at the Terasic site (DE10-standard / DE2-115)

I know that this answer does not include the use of the FTDI microcoltroller, but it could be a way to get you started.

See also https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/programmable/configuration-device.html

Best Regards,

Johi.

aakkü's avatar
aakkü
Icon for Occasional Contributor rankOccasional Contributor
7 years ago

Thanks for your answer Johi.

In my application I need hi-speed USB and DAC and FT93xx microcontrollers have these, and therefore I am going to have this microcontroller in the board. It would be really nice to be able to update FPGA configuration through USB using the microcontroller on board.

I want to know how difficult it is to program the FPGA over microcontroller. Can an FPGA be simply reconfigured via a serial interface such as I2C or SPI?

For some reason I can't use NIOS II processor I get errors no one can seem to solve. Link to the error: https://forums.intel.com/s/question/0D50P00004DAgF9SAL/another-sldhub-error

Thanks.