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Altera_Forum
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10 years ago

Communication between Cyclone III FPGA and PC vis USB(on board)

Dear Madam/Sir, My name is Peipei Hu, from the University of Manchester, UK. I am doing a project relates to FPGA Cyclone III. Basically, I use Cyclone III FPGA Starter Board(EP3C25F324)...
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Altera_Forum
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10 years ago

The simplest way is to use and FTDI chip and communicate to this via a serial interface. Many of the development boards take this approach. Look at the reference manual https://www.altera.com/en_us/pdfs/literature/manual/rm_ciii_starter_board.pdf it appears the board has a USB to serial chip on board. But it appears to be used by the USB blaster interface.. It hints that it's also available for user mode operations, but without going over the schematic I can't say for sure.

But if you are doing a HSMC board anyway, simply add an FTDI chip like the FT232R device to your board and run build a uart into the FPGA to talk to the outside world.

Drivers for FTDI USB to Serial devices are built into windows/linux so do you don't need to mess with that side.

Pete