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Altera_Forum
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17 years ago

Cyclone II : Configuration through Embedded JTAG

Dear All, i am new to the FPGA world. I am using FPGA for signal processing. i have the *.rbf file. i want to load this file into FPGA SRAM.this the following step i m performing: ...
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Altera_Forum
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17 years ago

The Configuration Handbook doesn't show, how JTAG configuration is carried out, it's assuming a JAM configuration file rather than rbf and using the embedded JAM player software. I'm not aware of the wire protocol with JTAG configuration, but I think it's different from just streaming out a rbf file. (A rbf file, by the way, has a header, that would be skipped when using it e. g. for PS configuration).

The embedded JAM player sources and related information can be found at Altera website. As far as I remember, there are a text based, JAM and a binary JBC format. Both are containing sequences of JTAG instruction together with the data, which makes them very unhandy compared to simple binary configuration bitstreams, they are mainly used in multiple vendor production enviroments. A native embedded JTAG programmer, directly processing bitstreams, most likely isn't provided by Altera.