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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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19 years ago

Viable alternatives to the EPCS family

Hi Folks,

Most of us are aware that its possible to substitute serial memory devices from ST and Spansion inplace of the Altera EPCS family.

However, this only appears to work (for me) in "Dumb" configuration schemes, where the FPGA blindly loads data out of the SPI chip.

If I try to use an intelligent boot solution .JIC or Nios Flash programmer, then the scheme interrogates the Boot_prom and if it's not a genuine Altera device, the operation fails.

Has anyone found out how to fool the Altera SW into letting them use Non Altera SPI devices in "Intelligent" configuration schemes.

In my ignorance I assume that Quartus and the Nios IDE just need to be augmented with the Silicon ID's of the ST and Spansion parts to work. Since the organisation of these non-OEM devices will be that same as the EPCS units, have I missed an obvious pit-fall?

D.

1 Reply

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

    Nios flash programmer only requires the chip ID to deduce the size of sectors. Instructions were already posted to the forum, so make another search, you have to add a file to your Quartus directory. The ST devices have the same IDs as Altera devices, so there is no need for modifications if you use devices with sizes already provided by Altera (1, 4, 16, 64Mbit). I tested with a ST 32Mbit device and it worked, meaning I was able to use the Nios flash programmer to upload hardware and software and it booted ok.

    IzI