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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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8 years ago

OpenCore Plus IP Licensing

Hi,

I've been working on a project using a nios ii soft cpu and have had no problems with it. However, recently a message has appeared after using the programmer;

"Click Cancel to stop using OpenCore Plus IP

Time remaining: unlimited"

Presumably this is the result of some licensing issue? I've never had this appear before. To clarify I've been using the free tools with Quartus Prime Lite.

If this is a licensing issue, how would this affect my ability to use these devices? I'm not intending to go into any sort of volume production, but I cannot afford for my end use case to be hooked up to the computer it was programmed on, and would also need to be programmed into flash memory. The application is purely academic research at a university.

If this does affect my ability to use the devices, what would be the easiest (cheapest!) way to rectify?

Many thanks in advance, I've been really enjoying Altera's tools and have been recommending them to everyone I know. :)

2 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    8 years ago

    The fast version of the Nios IP requires licensing. The economy version is free. So if you can get away with using economy instead of fast, you'd be fine.

    Other than that, there's no other way to get away with the untethered setup you mention without licensing the IP.

    Since you are at a university, there is a university program from Intel FPGA that might help, but I don't know much about it.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    8 years ago

    Thanks sstrell, I understand now.

    On a similar topic, I've managed to fit my design onto the economical version of the nios ii, but despite generating a .jic and uploading successfully, I still need to start the nios ii on every startup from eclipse (run as hardware). Is there a way I can get it to run on startup with my free licences? Or would I need to purchase something from Altera?

    If it is possible without purchasing what is the procedure as I have tried using the NIOS ii flash programmer but it seems to refuse to cooperate, even when I tell it to ignore mismatched system ids etc. See below.

    Many thanks in advance again.