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Altera_Forum
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11 years ago

Remote update Flash EPROM (EPCS16) using lan/ uart

Hello all, i have question. I need to update throw ethernet my flash memory EPCS16 on some board with EP3C16 FPGA. The ethernet i convert to uart using xport and the data from uart i need to sa...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
11 years ago

Hi Jan:

Yes, I've very familiar with the Lantronix devices. We did several designs with the Xport-AR several years ago. And are currently supporting them and some successors with newer Xport devices.

I agree with this setup the UART interface would be the best.

http://www.altera.com/literature/ug/ug_altremote.pdf is the userguide for the megafunction.

One issue we ran into is the simulation model of the megafunction is non-existant, so we did use signal tap to make sure it was working correctly.

In our design the UART communications and register interface to talk to the megafunction was all custom logic.. We did slip streaming with parity and CRC error detection, to make sure it was programmed with valid data.

The use case for this, is you still need to initially program the EPCS with a initial bitfile that has the REMOTE_UPGRADE megafuction. But this allows you to write a secondary image and switch over to that secondary image with a fall back to the initial image if it failes.

It works well, and the fall back is nice. Basically we had the master system do a version check on the bitfile, if it didn't match what was expected it would try the secondary bit file and check versions again. If it fell back to the first bitfile, or the version still did not match, it would program the new bitfile into the secondary space, and try the switchover again.

Pete