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Altera_Forum
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12 years ago

Altera USB-Blaster II Design

Hello, I was given instructions on building my own USB Blaster II from altera. They gave me the required drivers, a program to program the CPLD, as well as a .pof file they created to program the ...
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Altera_Forum
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12 years ago

Hi Ryan,

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That is correct. the MAx II CPLD we used was the EPM570GM100. And all we were given was .exe program they wrote that runs through the Quartus 12.0 interface, a .pof for the CPLD programming, and the drivers for binding prior to programming.

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If you look at the USB-Blaster II circuit on p25 of the schematic, you can see that the Cypress FX2 device EEPROM signals FX2_SCL/SDA connect to the MAX II device. This implies that the MAX II UFM (user flash memory) is being used to emulate the I2C EEPROM. This means that the MAX II .pof contains *both* the MAX II configuration image and the Cypress FX2 EEPROM image. This is why the instructions document tells you that you have to send Altera the USB serial ID information.

Here's what I recommend.

1. Erase the MAX II device, power cycle your board, and use USBView to look at the USB ID of the board.

According to the instructions document, the FX2 should show up as Cypress FX2 ID (VID=04B4, PID=8613).

2. Use the Altera jtagmaxprog tool to program the .pof into the MAX II device, and then cycle power so that the MAX II configures using this .pof.

Use USBView to look at the USB IDs of the board.

The USB-Blaster II should now show up with whatever ID Altera expects for the device, which according to:

http://www.altera.com/download/drivers/dri-usb_b-lnx.html

is 09fb:6010 or 09fb:6810

Unless of course you supplied Altera with a custom VID/PID combo.

3. If (2) fails, then create a MAX II configuration that simply blinks an LED, and use jtagmaxprog to download it.

jtagmaxprog is just a program that bit-bangs the MAX II JTAG interface to download a configuration. A blinky LED .pof file should download fine. Since the MAX II will not implement the EEPROM image, the FX2 will still appear on the bus after you cycle power.

This last step will confirm that you do not have a hardware issue with the MAX II power. It will not confirm you don't have a short on the signals between the MAX II and the FX2 devices - do you have multiple boards that you can test?

Cheers,

Dave