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CycloneIV Reconfiguration from network without rewriting flash

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
‎05-30-2014 08:01 PM
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Hi, 

 

as a hobby/learning project, I'm building a system with two major uses: 

 

1. it should control LED lighting in my home (6000 WS2812) 

2. it should help the rendering farm when I'm not at home 

 

I'm loading the configuration image from an EPCS16SI8N, and have added a GMII PHY and 512 Mbit SDRAM. 

 

Now, the easy approach would be to have one or two application images, and use ALTREMOTE_UPDATE to trigger reconfiguration, and ALTASMI_PARALLEL to rewrite images for updates. 

 

As I'd like to experiment with OpenCL a bit, and would also like to automatically schedule jobs, I'd be rewriting the configuration memory quite a lot, which I think would be suboptimal. 

 

- Is there a reconfiguration method that allows me to load a bitstream "generated" by the running configuration? 

- Is there a configuration method that can be interfaced to SDRAM (e.g. via a small CPLD)? (I'm using the E144 variant, so parallel configuration is out) 

- Is there a better approach I have missed? 

 

Simon
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
‎05-30-2014 09:12 PM
369 Views

Hi Simon, 

 

Are you in the process of designing a custom board? If so, then all you need is an intelligent configuration controller, eg., a microcontroller with external memory for configuration data storage. That storage can be non-volatile (SD card), or volatile (SDRAM) depending on the capabilities of your microcontroller. The FPGA can then be configured by the microcontroller using passive serial or fast passive parallel. 

 

I doubt Cyclone IV will support OpenCL, so you'll want to leave that "thought" for another project. 

 

Cheers, 

Dave
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