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Priesemut's avatar
Priesemut
Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
5 years ago
Solved

Blinking a LED on DE10-Lite board (MAX10 FPGA)

Hello everybody out there using FPGAs, I'm new to FPGA development and trying to blink a LED on the DE10-Lite board. I carefully followed the steps on "How to program your first FPGA device" (htt...
  • sstrell's avatar
    sstrell
    5 years ago

    If you have a DE-10 board and you're following those instructions, you shouldn't have to change anything. I don't understand the warning you get because there is no DE10_Lite_Golden_Top.v file.

    My guess is that when you went through the New Project Wizard, you either selected a project template (instead of Empty Project) or on the Family, Device, and Board Settings page, you selected a board from the Board tab instead of selecting the specific device on the Device tab. Doing either of these might create an example top-level file (DE10_Lite_Golden_Top.v) that is now getting used instead of blink.v. You can verify this is the issue by looking at the name of the top-level entity in the Project Navigator in the upper-left corner of the tool

    The easiest thing to do would be to start from the beginning and follow the instructions carefully, but if you don't want to do that, go to the Project menu and select Add/Remove Files in Project. Make sure only your blink.v and .sdc file are listed. Then, with blink.v open, again from the Project menu, select Set as Top-Level Entity. Recompile and try again.

    #iwork4intel

sstrell's avatar
sstrell
Icon for Super Contributor rankSuper Contributor
5 years ago

If you have a DE-10 board and you're following those instructions, you shouldn't have to change anything. I don't understand the warning you get because there is no DE10_Lite_Golden_Top.v file.

My guess is that when you went through the New Project Wizard, you either selected a project template (instead of Empty Project) or on the Family, Device, and Board Settings page, you selected a board from the Board tab instead of selecting the specific device on the Device tab. Doing either of these might create an example top-level file (DE10_Lite_Golden_Top.v) that is now getting used instead of blink.v. You can verify this is the issue by looking at the name of the top-level entity in the Project Navigator in the upper-left corner of the tool

The easiest thing to do would be to start from the beginning and follow the instructions carefully, but if you don't want to do that, go to the Project menu and select Add/Remove Files in Project. Make sure only your blink.v and .sdc file are listed. Then, with blink.v open, again from the Project menu, select Set as Top-Level Entity. Recompile and try again.

#iwork4intel

Priesemut's avatar
Priesemut
Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
5 years ago

Choosing a "Device" instead of a "Board" (in the tabs of the "New Project Wizard") seems promising, but did not result in success (i.e. blinking LEDs) yet.

What could be the problem and I don't understand yet is how Quartus knows which PIN of the MAX10 corresponds to a LED or a clock:

In the instructions on "How to program your first FPGA device" (https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/how-to-program-your-first-fpga-device.html), LED[0] seems to be assigned to PIN_W15 in the pin planner. I'm not sure whether this is also the case with the 10M50DAF484C7G on the DE10-Lite board. I'm particularly in doubt whether PIN_V11 on the DE10-Lite board can really be used for "clk", because the Pin Legend of the Pin Planner says its a "DIFF_n".

Please find also a screenshot of the Pin Planner below.