Forum Discussion

Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
10 years ago

Terasic Blaster issue with Quartus II

I purchased a P0302 USB-Blaster™ download cable, to program an Altera® FPGA mounted on a printed circuit board, at the recommendation of my electronics design vendor. He has used these devices successfully for years and suggested I get one so he could just send me .pof files and I could update the FPGA firmware from my pc using the Quartus II (64 bit) software (v14.1.0/build 186).

When I run the Quartus software, I get a failure at 25% during verification. We thought it was a faulty product so my vendor purchased one from DigiKey and it is doing the same thing. The software will make it through the "Program/Configure" stage after a few tries, but it will never make it through "Verify" The Terasic Blaster is a knock-off of the Altera Blaster, so Altera won't support the Terasic board.

Has anyone else seen this issue or have any ideas on how to get some help? We tried sending an email to Terasic support, but the response we got back was such poorly written English that I have little confidence they will be of any assistance.

4 Replies

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

    There might be something wrong with the target hardware. Have you tried using a different board?

    What happens with a .sof file?
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    10 years ago

    --- Quote Start ---

    There might be something wrong with the target hardware. Have you tried using a different board?

    What happens with a .sof file?

    --- Quote End ---

    Yes, we have 3 prototype boards and the old Terasic Blaster works fine with all of them, but the two new Blasters have the same problem regardless of which board we us.

    I will try to get my EE to chime in here regarding the .sof file.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    10 years ago

    The blaster II runs at a higher jtag clock frequency than the older ones. Check the signal integrity of the jtag clock. You may need to work on it. I think there is a setting somewhere to lower the frequency. You might also try that.

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

    The Altera USB Blaster allows the JTAG clock to be reduced. See the USB-Blaster II Download Cable User Guide, page 2.7.

    The same method might work for the Terasic Blaster.