Booting NIOS II from Altera Serial Flash Controller (EPCQ) with blinking LEDs

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Intel FPGA Wiki:Booting NIOS II from Altera Serial Flash Controller (EPCQ) with blinking LEDs

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Contents

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• 1 Booting NIOS II from Altera Serial Flash Controller (EPCQ) with blinking LEDs design example
• 1.1 Overview
• 1.2 Hardware considerations
• 1.3 Software considerations

Booting NIOS II from Altera Serial Flash Controller (EPCQ) with blinking LEDs design example

Overview

A design of booting NIOS II processor from EPCQ flash with blinking LEDs is presented here. This design was created following the AN-736 Nios II Processor Booting From Altera Serial Flash (EPCQ), utilizing Cyclone V SOC development board. If another device would be targeted for this project, the user can change the targeted device in this example to any required device, with the following steps:

• Change the device family from Assignment tab > Device > Device family.
• Change the pin assignments for the reset signal (Push button) and the clock source, from Assignments tab > pin planner.
• Change the EPCQ/S model in EPCQ_CONTROLLER IP according to the user board specifications.

The Design file can be downloaded from here File:NIOS DEBUG.zip.

Hardware considerations

The snapshot below elaborates the basic Qsys system required for booting NIOS II from EPCQ flash.

Please Note the following points:

• The NIOS II reset vector points to the EPCQ controller, with some reset offset value.
• The NIOS II exception vector points to the On-chip ram.
• The maximum frequency allowed for the Altera serial flash controller is 25MHz. Hence, to use a higher frequency for NIOS II, a PLL would be used in the design, to maintain the data synchronization.

Software considerations

The user must consider the bsp settings according to AN 736.

NOTE: This Project works on NIOS II/f core only, since NIOS II/e core is not able to boot from EPCQ.