Stratix IV Dev Board with Nios II Ethernet Standard Design: No PHY connected

The triple speed ethernet design example (https://www.altera.com/support/support-resources/design-examples/intellectual-property/embedded/nios-ii/exm-tse-sgdma.html)has had some additional issues that I worked through. This post is simply to help others in case they run into the same problem.

I initially switched to Quartus v14.0 and loaded the example project on Altera’s website specifically for 14.0: 4sgx230 triple speed ethernet zip file (14.0) (https://www.altera.com/content/dam/altera-www/global/en_us/others/support/examples/download/niosii-triple-speed-ethernet-4sgx230-qsys.zip)

While labeled as v14.0, this example project is clearly not generated from 14.0. Eclipse will fail to compile complaining of missing header files: bsp/drivers/src/altera_avalon_tse.h

This is caused by the TSE driver is not included in the BSP because it is missing in Qsys. Opening the design in Qsys you will see the error:

Component triple_speed_ethernet 13.0 not found or could not be instantiated

This Qsys design although labeled as v14.0 was built with v13.0 components. Qsys is not compatible with older versions.

The solution is to use the above design file labeled as v14.0 with Quartus v13.0.