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GordWait's avatar
GordWait
Icon for Occasional Contributor rankOccasional Contributor
1 month ago

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...
Board Debug
Fpga Devkit
LeonardoG's avatar
LeonardoG
Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
13 days ago

Hello,

We are seeing the exact same issue on our Cyclone V GT Dev Kit boards. We run our own custom FPGA firmware, which is known-good and has been in use for quite some time, and we have already adapted to the rev. A to rev. B flash changes, so that is not a factor.

Over the last few weeks, several brand-new Dev Kit boards have started behaving exactly as GordWait described: the board retries configuration multiple times, with nStatus and nConfig toggling, until it hits the timeout. This happens with both our custom firmware and the factory image. It was intermittent at first and has gotten progressively worse, and we also noticed a dependence on board temperature, which could be relevant for a timing issue.

The failing board we have on hands now are the 5CPCIE00100214 and 5CPCIE00100263, both with the QS3861. We also have an older board that works 100% of the time (5CPCIE00100041) which uses the QS3VH800.

As OP suggested we briefly tried changing the MAX 5 design to improve timing and the situation improved greatly. Still, this is a disappointing situation with a lot of time lost chasing ghosts.

Thanks.

FakhrulA_altera's avatar
FakhrulA_altera
Icon for Regular Contributor rankRegular Contributor
5 days ago

Hi Leonardo,

Thank you for sharing your findings.

As this thread is focused on GordWait's investigation, could you please open a new thread for your boards? This will help us track your case separately and avoid mixing debug information from different systems.

Please include the board serial numbers, revision, U29 component, and observed behavior in the new post.

Thank you for your understanding.

  • FakhrulA_altera's avatar
    FakhrulA_altera
    Icon for Regular Contributor rankRegular Contributor
    4 days ago

    Hi Gord,
     

    Thank you for the detailed analysis.

    Please submit an RMA request through the distributor that supplied each affected board:

    DigiKey or Mouser: provide the board serial number, purchase details, and factory-image boot failure.

    Terasic: follow Terasic’s RMA process and state that the board does not boot reliably with the unmodified factory MAX V image.


    Affected boards retry or fail with the factory max5.pof and a simple 25 MHz bootloader, indicating a hardware issue.

    Please retain the serial numbers, boot observations, and relevant logs.


    Regards, 
    Fakhrul