Quartus Web Edition and Altera IP

Altera_Forum · ‎10-22-2013

Hi all,

I bought the Cyclone V Development Kit. Further, I use Quartus Web Edition to Compile my VHDL design.

Well, things work well and I can use, for instance, the HPS component and boot Linux. Everything works fine. However, I need all 3 Ethernet ports available on that board, so I decided to synthesize the two additional Ethernet MACs in the FPGA part. But Quartus failed and gave various error messages, stating that the Netlist cannot be generated. Okay, in the meantime I found what the problem was with that thing, now it compiles at least and produces a SOF file. But I need rbf file, because I use U-Boot to configure the FPGA via TFTP.

I tried to convert the generated SOF to RBF, but that fails because "the file contains time-limited IP". Why is that? I thought I also have some sort of license when I bought that board.

So my questions:

a) How to make RBF file?

b) if license is really needed: is there some sort of temporary license? I need it only for university project which is finished at the end of this year. But I could not find some option to get evaluation license in Quartus. 30 days will unfortunately be a little too short :-(

c) however, if there is no temporary license and conversion to RBF is not possible - can the SOF be used to program the FPGA from the HPS using some sort of bootloader?

I would like to use the Altera TSE MAC in conjunction with the Scatter Gather DMA. Will I get additional licensing issues with the DMA, or is the MAC the "only" problematic component?

Is there some sort of more simplistic Ethernet MAC which can be used with the Web license?

Many thanks in advance for your help.

Altera_Forum · ‎10-24-2013

If you look at the assembler report, go to the "Encrypted IP Cores Summary" section, and you'll have a list of all the licensed IPs and which ones aren't licensed.

AFAIK you can't generate anything else than a time limited SOF when you don't have the license. So your only option to configure the FPGA is to program the .sof through a USB blaster (either external, or embedded on the kit).