Fail to Boot Software from EPCS16

Hi,

I'm in the process of fighting the same battle and seem to be having a little more success. I also have a EPCS16 with a Cyclone III.

Everything about how you have your EPCS connected in your design sounds correct. You have the EPCS controller included in your NIOS core. You have the pins connected in the top level and you also set them as user I/O in the device settings. That is all good.

Once I got past all of this I had no trouble using the flash-programmer gui to program both my SOF and ELF files into the EPCS. Though the one thing that did happen to me was that in the GUI I had both file entered in the files fot flash conversion field but had the elf file highlighted. After looking at the output results I noticed that only the elf file was programmed into the flash so be careful about this.

Now my design runs stand-alone. The one thing I can't do is "run as NiosII Hardware" in the NIOS IDE. The NIOS IDE is attempting to load the code into the EPCS and then fails to verify it. I'm guessing I need to somehow get it to load the code into the on-system memory. If anyone has any suggestions on how to fix this, please let me know. Hope this helps.

Lance.