Cyclone VGT Dev Kit boards - some new boards failing to boot from NOR Flash
We've been using these boards for years, having certified them for use in one of our products.
In the last few months we have now received 5 of these boards and they fail to configure from NOR flash. These are all the new Rev B CVGT Dev Kit edition.
Not all of the new RevB fail, but the fail rate is high, getting close to 50%. Yes, we know they changed to a Micron NOR flash for Rev B and rerouted some data lines, we are using the new RevB MAX5 files and have updated the Cyclone V NOR flash pins to match as well.
I made some diagnostic changes to the MAX5 boot source (I set the PGM leds to count retries) and discovered that on the bad boards, the boot process goes through multiple configuration retries and eventually the watchdog timer fires, turns on the ERR (D5) red LED and stops.
With the factory image they come with, there are also dozens of retries, then sometimes the boards fail, sometimes they boot up.
With the slow speed that the NOR flash configuration runs at, there is no reason that it should ever fail and retry, and indeed on good boards they configure the first time every time with no retries.
The first four we were able to send back to Altera (Via digikey where we bought them).
We just got another bad one yesterday, this one from Mouser.
Has anyone else seen this issue, and/or heard from Altera about this?
Board link: