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Altera_Forum
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10 years ago

Converting .sof and .elf to make single .pof

Hi Everybody, I am in the process of buying Licence for IP Which I used in my program. Till now I am testing my program with time_limited.sof file for FPGA and .elf file for NIOSII and It ...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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10 years ago

The method that you are attempting to use will end up with the FPGA configuration data at the beginning of the EPCS, and the NIOS firmware sitting in EPCS right after that.

The NIOS firmware is not directly usable when it is sitting in the EPCS flash. It needs to be copied from EPCS to RAM before the NIOS starts executing.

This relocation is usually performed by the boot loader included with the "EPCS Serial Flash Controller" IP block. So if you haven't already, you need to add that core and configure it appropriately, and have your NIOS reset vector point to it.

If you search around for "NIOS EPCS boot" there's many other threads/appnotes/knowledgebase related to it.