Honored ContributorI am planning to program my Max 10 via JTAG interface and USB Blaster. Is it necessary to define the pins nSTATUS, CONF_DONE, and nCONFIG in my top level module? Also how do assign them in the pin planner? Thanks in advance
Honored ContributorThose pins are dedicated FPGA pins. Therefore, you cannot touch them in pin planner.
There is the MAX10 Documentation (simple google search): https://www.altera.com/en_us/pdfs/literature/hb/max-10/ug_m10_config.pdf Figure 3-1 shows how to connect USB blaster to JTAG pins. nSTATUS, CONF_DONE, nCONFIG are set internally to display the status of configuration. CONF_DONE is a bidirectional pin usually. So you can hold it low to prevent the FPGA from running once configured.Honored ContributorIn MAX 10 device, these nSTATUS, CONF_DONE, and nCONFIG pins are dual-purpose pins.
During configuration, these pins function as configuration pins. However during user mode, these pins can be use as regular IO. You can set the options to turn on and off the dual-purpose function for these pins in Quartus II. You can refer the details from the pin connection guidelines: https://www.altera.com/content/dam/altera-www/global/en_us/pdfs/literature/dp/max-10/pcg-01018.pdf
