What is Altera postion about USB Blaster Clones?

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We are implementinng a very minimalist solution (microcontroller based) to reduce cost. Our board is targeting people that never used FPGA so usually a low cost board helps a lot.

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So long as you do not want to be compatible with Quartus,, i.e., want your hardware to appear as a USB-Blaster, you can use the microcontroller to program the FPGA using standard methods. For example,

http://www.ovro.caltech.edu/~dwh/carma_board/fpga_configuration.pdf

The minimalist approach is probably an FTDI FT232H in MPSSE mode, i.e., a chip that costs ~$2.50.

Cheers,

Dave