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Altera_Forum
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9 years ago

Question about boot NIOS from Micron N25Q flash

Hi all, I am using arrow cyclone v soc kit, with a Cyclone V 5csxf6d6f31c6 chip which has a hardcore ARM-A9 inside. but i am not using this arm core, i am just working with nios purely on fpga sid...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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9 years ago

If your nios application works as expected if you program it into the FPGA to run immediately, but not when you boot it from EPCS, you are most likely not setting the boot vector right. (for the flash variant)

For boot from flash you need to set the boot vector to the flash device.

Reason: Your NIOS "logic part" gets loaded from flash first and when it gets clocked and out of reset, the software needs to start somewhere. If if boots from onchip_mem (most likely initialized to 0x0), then your application is not loaded. If it boots from flash, Quartus puts per default a bootload in there, which loads your application and then runs it.

Hint for boot check: Use two LEDs: one that is entirely blinking because of VHDL code (or Verilog, ...) and one because of NIOS.