Honored ContributorIn looking at the price for Alteras EPCS64 device, it costs almost as much as a Cyclone II FPGA itself... which is ridiculous IMO. I thought I would see if any innovative folk here have come up wtih a good alternative for flashing FPGAs?
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--- Quote End --- Hi Jay, I agree with you. For EPCS replacement (with ST,SST flash devices) check http://www.fpga.ch/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4 (http://www.fpga.ch/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4) Hope it will help you http://forum.niosforum.com/work2/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif LATTICE are more clever since they support low cost standard SPI flash !!!
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--- Quote End --- An other cost effective solution (compared to EPCS64) is to use a standard parallel NOR flash and use a cheap CPLD to program FPGA from this flash. Regards.
Honored ContributorWell, Altera is "smart" in a sense - they are using standard SPI Flash devices. If you look at the device itself, it is the exact same as an SPI Flash device... except some kind of ID is different, and then they remark it and bump up the price 3-4 times, which is ridiculous. Otherwise, functionally, it's the same as the ST Micro flashes. I will check out that link too.
Unfortunately, I can't use a parallel flash chip because it's a waste of IO IMO - that, and I don't like the Parallel flash because they are too restrictive, and then the CPLD is even more real-estate, cost , etc...Honored ContributorHi:
If you don't need to keep more than one FPGA configurations, the most cost-effective solution is to use one single SPI configuration device (active serial configuration). Several SPI flash memories from ST may be used. We use an M25P16 as an active serial configuration device. For using the HAL flash functions to read/write from this device some very simple driver modifications (for properly recognising the device id) are required. We use this flash to store the FPGA configuration and the startup application (custom bootloader), booting like if it were an EPCS device. The flashprogrammer does not work with this device, but we are able to update its contents from the custom bootloader, then it's just a matter of reding/writing using the Quartus programmer. The command line tools are very useful for creating the required .flash files from the .elf and .sof files.
