Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorI found a solution to my problem. I can program the Cyclone III Development Board after setting SW3 (JTAG Control DIP Switch) to 1xx0. I think there is a problem with confusion over the mapping between open/closed, on/off, and 0/1, both on the board and in the documentation. These terms are used differently in different places, which is very confusing.
Even worse, the settings for SW3 stated in the user's manual are just plain wrong. It says to set SW3 to on/off/off/on, which could be interpreted as either 1001 (traditional) or (0110) (active low logic). The board is labeled with "0" and "1" only so you have to guess which way it is. However, both 1001 and 0110 are wrong, and neither will let you program the board. Only 1xx0 works. Based on the fact that this configuration works and other markings on the board, I conclude that "0" means "on" for this particular switch bank, because this interpretation is consistent with SW3.1 == 1 and labeled as "FPGA_BYPASS" (no, we do not want to bypass the FPGA) and SW3.4 == 0 and labeled as "MAX_ENABLE" (yes, I want the USB-Blaster enabled). On SW1 however it appears that "0" means "off". The user manual says that the "MAX0" switch (SW1.5) must be set to "1" for the USB-Blaster to be enabled. Although as it turns out the position of this switch doesn't matter. As long as SW3 is set correctly the position of SW1.5 makes no difference. I hope the poor quality of documentation associated with this board isn't indicative of Altera's overall quality. I guess I'm going to find out as my project requires Altera FPGAs. I really hate wasting my time debugging bad documents.
