Export Avalon Bus for Custom PHY

Hi Peter,

I agree on your rant :)

Which version of Quartus are you using, and which Custom PHY part are you trying to use?

If you open an existing transceiver example ...

http://www.altera.com/support/examples/on-chip-debugging/on-chip-debugging.html

and then select the PHY in Qsys, you can right-click and find where the _hw.tcl source for the component is located.

If you find your PHY in an example, your first question will be "Hang on, how is this PHY in Qsys, but I cannot see it in the IP Catalog!!!???".

The answer is that for some reason Altera has set an attribute in _hw.tcl so that the component is hidden. You have to edit the _hw.tcl file and change

set_module_property INTERNAL true

to

set_module_property INTERNAL false

and then start the NIOS II IDE shell (Cygwin), change directory to Altera's .ipx file location and re-run ip-make-ipx to rebuild the IP Catalog.

Yes, this is a complete PITA ... but at this point you will see the PHY listed in the IP Catalog.

The main reason that the PHYs are not listed is probably that they are still buggy, so as they say "Your mileage may vary" :)

Cheers,

Dave