Intro to Altera SoC Devices for HW Developers Workshop

Intro to Altera SoC Devices for HW Developers Workshop

This is the take-home HW lab to accompany the 1/2 day Intro to SoC for HW & SW Developers Workshop. In this lab, you will create an ARM based system, connect it to FPGA peripherals, compile the HW design, program the design into a development board, and run a simple application to verify that the lab has completed.Introduction

This take-home lab is a cursory introduction to building an SoC hardware system for quick evaluation by new users. If you are embarking on an SoC design, it is strongly recommended that you take the "Designing with an ARM based SoC" course in the "For Further Learning" section below in order to be successful.

Lab Requirements

A Windows or Linux PC with two available USB ports
Quartus II, version 15.0.x

This lab is built for and tested against Quartus 15.0.x. It is recommended that this version of Quartus be used for the lab.

Atlas SoC Board

This lab runs and was tested on the Atlas SoC Board

Linux microSD card

This card was distributed during the in-class workshop. It contains all of the files necessary to complete the lab.

A terminal program capable of interfacing to the SoCKit's built-in USB serial port.

PuTTY is a common terminal program supported for both Linux and Windows which works well.

== For Further Learning == UPDATE THIS LIST This lab is a quick overview of the HW development tool flow for SoC. There are several on-line and instructor led Courses which provide the knowledge necessary to complete an SoC design. Links to these courses are below:

Instructor-led Introduction to Quartus

Online 90-Minute Introduction to Quartus

Instructor Led Introduction to QSys

Online 90-Minute Introduction to QSys

Online One-Hour Advanced QSys

Instructor Led Designing with an ARM-based SoC

Instructor Led Developing Software for an ARM-based SoC

Obtain and Configure a Supported Development Board

You will need to obtain and configure the Atlas SoC development board in order to complete the lab work for this workshop. The configuration requirements for the workshop lab are available on this page:

Atlas SoC Workshop Series Board Configuration

Copy the Lab Materials from SD Card

You will need to mount the FAT partition on the SD card onto your development host machine and copy some files from the SD card onto your development host. There are basically two ways to accomplish this.

You can simply plug the SD card into your development host using whatever SD card reader you used to image the SD card in the first place. Then mount the FAT partition on your develpment host.

You can plug the SD card into your target development board, connect the USB OTG cable between the target and your host, boot your target into linux where it should automatically start the USB gadget mass storage service and you should see a removable USB media device appear on your development host. At that point you can mount the FAT partition on your development host. For more information on this proceedure please refer to this link, Interacting with the USB gadget mass storage interface.

Once you get the FAT partition mounted on your development host the layout of your SD card contents should look similar to this.

!!!!!! Add SD Card image Now move the following objects from the SD card onto your local hard drive of your host development machine.

1. Create a working directory somewhere on your local hard drive of your development host. Be certain that there are no spaces in the path.

2. Copy the "SoC_HW_Workshop" folder from the SD card FAT partition into the working directory on your local hard drive.

Click here for image (SoC image)

You should now be prepared to start the lab.

Click here to continue to the next section>>>>