Help request for FLASH remote programming

What you are trying to do is actually quite straightforward but it sounds like you're probably a little new to FPGA design and therefore a bit overwhelmed by the components. Here are the components you need to figure out.

1 - Communication between your controller card and the FPGA. This is entirely up to you. You kind of need to figure this out first. Are you going to use some existing protocol to deliver information back and forth between the controller card and the FPGA? A typical approach is to simply provide a standard processor interface from the controller card and the FPGA (address, data, write, read, etc.). Then in the FPGA you memory-map the various components that you want the controller card to access. Then the controller card sort of has direct access to the Flash memory and whatever else you want it to acess.

2 - A CFI flash controller. You can either write your own or get one from a third party. A second option would be to use SoPC builder, a NIOS II processor, and the Altera-provided CFI flash component.

3 - Depending on how you're going to implement 1 & 2, you need to figure out how to connect the two together. How are you going to bridge between the Flash controller block and the "controller-card communication" block?

So, those are the basics of what you're going to have to figure out. As far as actual implementations, I and many others on the forum can provide you with ideas of what we have done in the past. However, you are going to need to know what the communication path between the controller card and FPGA is.

Jake