What is the recommended action for Cyclone IV boards with DDR2 ?

[pvs]

We have sold equipment containing a Cyclone IV board with DDR2 for some time.

To access the DDR2, we use the "DDR2 SDRAM Controller with AltMemPHY Intel FPGA IP" which internally has the name "altmemddr2".

We recently upgraded Quartus from version 17.1 to 22.1, but, according to the release notes for Quartus 19, support for Cyclone IV DDR2 has been dropped (!?)

Still, it seems that the System Designer contains an IP block that is called "DDR2 SDRAM Controller with AltMemPHY Intel FPGA IP", but now it has the internal name "alt_mem_if_civ_ddr2_emif". It has a different interface, and it looks like this IP block is actually older than the one we used previously: it reports version 1.0.0, and declares the Avalon interface to be a conduit.

I have spent some time trying to make this work, but it is quite tricky, and I wonder if I am wasting my time.

So my question is:

Is there a recommended way to use Quartus >= 19 for a Cyclone IV board with DDR2, or is the recommendation to just forget about using a newer version of Quartus with such boards?

[AdzimZM_Intel · Accepted solution]

Hello

Thank you for submitting your question in Intel Community.

I'm Adzim will assist you in this forum.

Regarding to your question, I think it's still okay to use with any Quartus version as long as the IP and device are supported by Quartus.

Unless the IP is already EOL, then need to use previous Quartus version.

For Cyclone IV device, this is quite old and there is not much IP development/improvement for this device anymore.

Even some of the IPs have been EOL in current Quartus version.

I think for Cyclone IV device, it's better to use in previous Quartus version such 18.1 and below due to IPs availability.

Regards,

Adzim

[pvs]

Thank you for confirming, I was half expecting it, but I guess there was no harm in asking.