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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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16 years ago

CFI FLASH access from Nios IDE

Good afternoon.

Unfortunatelly, i didn't find the solving of the problem with CFI Flash, so i decided to create a new thread.

I have Cycolne III Dev Kit and flash on the board and want to make access to flash through the CFI.

i have added the CFI Flash and Tri-state Bridge to my project. then made pins in the quartus and try make access to the flash.

At last i could get the CFI table from the Nios Command Shell through the nios2-flash-programmer and today i have succefully wrote data to the flash and read it from flash.

But i can't do the same in the Nios II IDE. The result of function alt_flash_open_dev(CFI_FLASH_NAME); is zero - so the device doesn't open.

The options in system library included all wrivers and the CFI i thnk so too...

Are there any ideas why it doesn't work?

4 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    16 years ago

    I had the same problem 3 weeks ago.

    The CFI flash is a 16-bit addressable device. I guess you have it wired up as if it was 8-bit addressable.

    Connect bit 1 of the NIOS address to bit 0 of the CFI device in your Verilog

    eg

    flash_padd[22..0] = nios_mod.address_to_the_cfi_flash[23..1];

    flash_padd[23] = clr;

    hope that helps ...

    Bruce
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    16 years ago

    Thank you very much.

    I've already successfully done the cfi flash.

    You are right, we should connect Nios [1] to pin flash[0].

    Besides we shouldn't mark option "reduced device drivers" or the drivers for the Flash won't be included.

    Today i tried to start the nios software from the CFI Flash and it works.

    if anybody have questions about the CFI Flash with Nios I'll try to answer it =)
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    16 years ago

    Unfortunatelly i have another problem: i can't get access to the flash from nios ide in the example of simple socket server (SSS), but i can see the cfi table from command shell of nios ide. I didn't check the small с library or reduced drivers in system library.

    But when i start the example of hello world - i can access flash from nios ide but a have the same settings of system library as for the SSS =(

    Are there any ideas about this case?
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    16 years ago

    Hello to everybody.

    I made my flash workable, but now I have a question.

    I have a special board with Cyclone III, not dev kit.

    There is no Max II.

    So I want to program my flash with Nios software to store there my cpu code.

    How can i programm it?

    There is a parallel flash loader, but it can load only pof files (sof i can convert to pof). And what about the *.flash type?

    Maybe there is a converter such as sof2flash, but flash2sof?