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Altera_Forum
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16 years ago

Hardware Reference Design

Hello I have been looking for a very simple programming circuit for cyclone III FPGA's for the past 6 months or so, and have not been able to find one...then the next thing I know bemicro came out wi...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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16 years ago

Yes, taking the license agreement strictly, the usage of the Arrow-USB-Blaster driver and design is restricted to Altera FPGA supplied by Arrow.

I assume, that Arrow is distributing Altera devices at regular conditions, so you may want to accept the agreement. I see a problematic point however: The driver is basically using a software technology provided by FTDI. You could design a similar driver yourself, if you had the interface specification for the Quartus JTAG server hardware dll.

Altera should be interested to provide a simple and inexpensive programming option for their FPGA. So they should either convince Arrow to release the driver and design to all Altera customers, or disclose the interface information.

Altera uses the more complicated CPLD based technique for USB Blaster, because it was developed before the FTDI MPSSE chips have been available, I think.