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leondietrich's avatar
leondietrich
Icon for Occasional Contributor rankOccasional Contributor
5 years ago
Solved

Intel Agilex F-Series dev kit cant be programmed by JTAG

Hi, Im officially out of luck. After wasting an entire week on trying to get the programmer to work I posting my question within this forum. I've got multiple bit stream files I'd like to use for ...
  • leondietrich's avatar
    leondietrich
    5 years ago

    Hi,

    thanks a lot for your help! We've fixed this issue now. One thing we'd like to share, for a potential future reader, is that in addition to the above mentioned article one needs to completely erase the flash prior to configuring. Our working solutions looks like the following:

    1. Power off the board. Waiting for the caps to be drained doesn't seam to be necessary.
    2. Set MSEL[2:0] to ON/OFF/OFF
    3. Power on the board.
    4. Erase the boards flash using the programmer tools
    5. Power off the board.
    6. Set MSEL[2:0] to OFF/OFF/OFF
    7. Power on the board
    8. Programm your *.sof file.

    It's also required to leave the JTAG chain in the default configuration while erasing the flash. Last but not least: If step 8 fails retry a couple of times until it stops failing (we usually don't need more than 3 tries). It also seams to be more reliable (programming fails less often) at 24MHz than 6MHz, which the programmer defaults to anyway.

Star's avatar
Star
Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
5 years ago

Hi,

Recently, I meet the same problem and struggle on it for couple of weeks. I read your solution and wanted to apply it to my PCB. But I encountered one problem when Erase the boards flash. I used the system console -->SDM Debugging Toolkit to erase the flash. However, the Toolkit replied message as shown below:

'QSPI Flash Sector 0x00000000: Erase Error'

It seems that the SDM Debugging Toolkit is useless when the device is not configured.

Can you clarify that how do you erase the boards flash using the programmer tools.

Thank you!

  • leondietrich's avatar
    leondietrich
    Icon for Occasional Contributor rankOccasional Contributor
    5 years ago

    Well,

    We're using the Quartus Programmer to erase the flash. Open the programmer from the Quartus menu -> click on "Auto Detect" to get the correct chain -> select erase for the flash chip -> press start

    • Star's avatar
      Star
      Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
      5 years ago

      Hi,

      We've tried your method and the programming always fails at 99%. The error messages are shown below:

      'Unexpected error in JTAG server: JTAG chain broken

      Unexpected error in JTAG server: JTAG chain broken

      Unexpected error in JTAG server: JTAG chain broken

      Unexpected error in JTAG server: JTAG chain broken

      Device not responding

      Unexpected error in JTAG server: JTAG chain broken

      Operation failed'

      Have you ever met the same problem?

      • leondietrich's avatar
        leondietrich
        Icon for Occasional Contributor rankOccasional Contributor
        5 years ago

        We indeed sometimes have a problem where the programmer failes at 99 percent but I can't recall ever having received those error messages. Usually the error resolves itself after rebooting the computer running the Jtag server. We redo the above meantioned steps prior to every programming attempt and that seams to work for us.