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Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorHow to connect PC Rs232 to CIII FPGA Pins?
I have cyclone III Starter board, with its HSMC connector occupied with a daughter card. I had my design done but I couldn't find a way to send data at run-time to the board from My PC. I am ta...
Altera_ForumHonored Contributor
Honored ContributorJTAG uses 4 signal (the other pins being Vcc,GND or NC) which are dedicated pins on the fpga. AFAIK you cannot use them as general purpose pins in your design.
Surely jtag can emulate a serial port, which is what the Quartus debugger does: but in this case I think you need a specific hardware (USB blaster or similar) and a pc side driver/software in addition to the jtag serial port module in the fpga; your external converter board is far from being enough. For a RS232 interface (say UART, since rs232 are actually the phy signal levels) you simply need a single input and a single output signal, provided you don't require flow control, which would add one more input and one more output. If you can wire these two pins out of your board, this is quite easy to implement. Regards Cris
