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Altera_Forum
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13 years ago

NIOS II and Cyclone III Remote Update

Have spent several days now searching and reading and think I am nearly there... but not quite. I am using the NIOS II core with SOPC builder. I use Quartus II for the FPGA image. This is a projec...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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12 years ago

Ok. I think you got it.

Regarding Nios firmware I forgot to mention that the default bootloader will automatically go to address 0; it will hence scan up to the end of the FPGA image and then start loading the Nios firmware, which is supposed to reside just after the FPGA image.

When you build a FPGA image that is supposed to be loaded at a non-null epcs address, you need to include a custom bootloader which performs a similar positioning operation from a different address offset. Or simply, like in the example I posted, define a conventional fixed address for firmware position: this somehow wastes some flash memory spaces between fpga and nios image, but makes bootloader much simpler. Moreover you maybe want to be able to update nios firmware while fpga is seldom changed: thus, if you align nios firmware image with one of epcs blocks, you can virtually erase and replace only the nios firmware image.