Honored ContributorI have a Stratix II development board which is part of a product that I have purchased.
I have several products, but one has broken down and meanwhile the company that delivered the product has gone out of business. I was wondering, is it possible to buy a new board, and clone the FPGA firmware, and transfer it to the new board?
Honored ContributorThe FPGA firmware is stored in an external flash memory. Using the Quartus programmer you should be able to read back the flash contents and write them to another board.
Honored ContributorI have downloaded Quartus programmer and purchased a USB Blaster. I can connect to the dev-board in the programmer. What should I do next, to upload the flash-memory to a file?
Honored ContributorWhich board is it and what flash is it using? If it is a parallel flash, you should be able to upload a parallel flash loader (http://www.altera.com/literature/ug/ug_pfl.pdf) image into the FPGA using the Quartus programmer, and then if you do a new autodetect, it should show you the flash with options to read/write/erase it. I don't use parallel flashes myself so I don't know the exact procedure, I just know it is possible.
If it is a serial flash you may have a special connector on the board to connect the USB blaster directly to it, and then you should also see it in the Quartus programmer when doing an autodetect. Without the special connector you must use the serial flash loader (http://www.altera.com/literature/an/an370.pdf). Even if you just need to read back the flash contents, you will have to create an empty project with the correct FPGA and EPCS flash, generate a .jic file from that and use it with the serial flash loader in the Quartus programmer to read back the flash contents. By the way, the read function in Quartus programmer is called "examine".
