EthernetBLASTER

[Altera_Forum]

Hi, everyone! 

I'm a student of electrical engineering and I've been working with FPGAs recently. I have no experience in this field so I hope you guys can help me with my problem. My question is:   To communicate a FPGA with the PC, the use of the EthernetBLASTER is required or is there another way to make this communication? And if the answer is "yes" , how?  IP Cores are logic blocks inside the FPGA's code?  Thanks

[Altera_Forum]

Typically, FPGAs get their internal state (hardware configuration) from an external memory (e.g. Flash). 

For development, there are "old" parallel printer port Byteblasters; most devkits come with a USB-Blaster or have something similar onboard. This is what's commonly used. So, the ethernet blaster is only one of many choices.  For production programming you can use these, or you can use different JTAG tools via STAPL. You can, as well, configure your FPGA during power on from another device, e.g. a processor.  When your FPGA is configured, it is up to you which interface to use, as you can implement any standard or proprietary interface you could think of in your FPGA. The building blocks are called IP core.  What kind of "communication" are you thinking of? Configure, Program, Debug or User data ?

[Altera_Forum]

To get Ethernet Blaster like functionality you can connect a different programming cable (like a USB-Blaster) to a PC, setup the Quartus II programmer on that PC to act as a JTAG server, and then from another PC connect to that remote JTAG server over Ethernet. There is documentation on how to do this and it should be functionality equivalent to an Ethernet Blaster.

[Altera_Forum]

One thing that only the ethernet blaster can do is key programming. 

If you are not doing key programming, then just use remote-jtag, like BadOmen mentioned.  You can buy netbook for $300 and just install quartus web edition, enable remote-jtag. I believe it is much cheaper than buying ethernetblaster.