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Altera_Forum
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13 years ago

Cyclone II Configuration Basics

I am designing with the EPC3C5F256C8N. I will initially configure with the EPCS4 and then,later, configure from a serial flash via a microcontroller. I have been digging through the Altera...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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13 years ago

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Hi,

the EPCS devices are compatible with all the FPGAs which support Active Serial configuration. In fact, EPCS are plain serial flash.

A common setup is to have AS+JTAG, without any pin headers in the AS signals, only for the JTAG signals.

This requires use of JTAG indirect programming to read/write the EPCS but it's more practical than having two sets of pin headers for the ByteBlaster.

The document you want is the Cyclone III handbook configuration section.

http://www.altera.com/literature/lit-cyc3.jsp

I don't think there's any documentation on designs which support more than one configuration scheme (other than JTAG) though.

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Thank you very much for the help. It looks like Figure 9-30 describes the indirect JTAG configuration, is that correct?

Why would I need two connectors otherwise? Perhaps one to configure the FPGA directly (during development) and one to program the EPCS4?

It also appears that the indirect method requires changes to the project in Quratus. I would rather avoid this if possible........

Thanks

Rich