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Altera_Forum
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14 years ago

How does the Cyclone start when power up ?

Thanks for valuable advice from the forum on selection of RAM for the board. I wish to know.... how the Cyclone starts when powerd on ? Where does it take the code from ??? What is ...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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14 years ago

It's basically a two step boot process. In a first step, the FPGA configuration is loaded from EPCS. This also includes initalized internal FPGA RAM (or "ROM"). Configuration load is common to all FPGA applications, with or without soft processor and starts always from EPCS address 0.

FPGA applications involving a soft processor have usually stored the processor code and initilized data in the EPCS memory. It's loaded to SRAM in a second boot step under control of the NIOS II IP.