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Altera_Forum
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14 years ago

Use a FPGA to flash the Nios II program in another FPGA

Hallo colleagues, I have the following problem: I have to work with a system in which I have a first FPGA which controls the JTAG port of a second FPGA. In this second FPGA I have a Nios II so...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
14 years ago

The first FPGA communicates with a remote processor (microcontroller) being integrated in its memmory space. The microcontroller has a serial connection with a PC.

It is a parallel flash what has to be programmed... but the second FPGA is a blackbox for me (I have no documentation at all... and no posibility of programming anything in it other than blindly...). The only communication between the FPGAs is the JTAG connection and some information buses for the operation the second FPGA does.

The problem is that, in my opinion, I can only perform the update operation by generating the same stream as the computer would do directly with the JTAG... for this I would need some kind of help interpreting what is in the .flash file (has it got headers or any information I should not directly copy through the JTAG?) and also about the protocol the altera programmer uses... I have searched quite a lot in the documentation but I was not able to find anything useful.

Thank you very much for your help :)