Intel® Quartus® Prime Software
Intel® Quartus® Prime Design Software, Design Entry, Synthesis, Simulation, Verification, Timing Analysis, System Design (Platform Designer, formerly Qsys)
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More than one USB Blaster connected to a host system

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Has anyone been successful hooking up more than one USB Blaster to a host system, to connect to multiple development systems, for FPGA programming and/or Signal TAP II? Did you run multiple instances of SignalTap II, one per USB Blaster, or just one instance of SignalTap II, connecting to only one USB Blaster + one development system at a time? 

 

Our current method is to move one USB Blaster cable around from development system to development system, but that does not work remotely, someone has to be in the lab. We would prefer not to waste the lab space having one dedicated host system for every development system.
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Hi, 

 

There should be no issue to use multiple usb blaster with a single PC. I have used that before with transceiver toolkit and interface with a few devkits at the same time.
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Note that some USB devices won't work with multiple instances of the same device unless they have unique serial numbers programmed. I don't know if this is true of the USB blaster. If it is, then some of the clones might not have different serial numbers.

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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is this under linux or windows?

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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We are using Windows for our programming machine

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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there is some time the driver do contribute some factor on this matter.

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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We've had up to 8 USB blasters connected to the same Linux server with no problem. It should work with Windows too. 

Usually I have one separate signaltap instance for each USB blaster I'm connected to, if I need to debug several targets at the same time.
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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I've had 9 connected to the same Windows PC before and they have all worked fine together.

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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hi David, maybe this only happen on your certain usb port? or consider a driver reinstall?

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Similar to TCWORLD, I have done multiple USB blasters connected to same Windows PC as well when debugging interfaces between different boards. They seems to work as expected.

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