PC to NanoBoard Communications

The NanoBoard is an integral part of Altium's LiveDesign-enabled design system and forms a sophisticated reconfigurable platform for design implementation and debug. The system makes extensive use of the JTAG and Nexus standards to provide flexible and extensible communications between the design software, the NanoBoard and the design running inside the daughter board FPGA plugged into the NanoBoard.

While it is not necessary to intimately understand the workings of JTAG in order to use the system, an overview of this technology will give you a better understanding of the architecture of the system – in particular, how the various views presented in the system relate to the physical and 'soft' devices present on the NanoBoard and in your design.

The ability to chain multiple NanoBoards together and to add user-developed boards to the system, and then to be able to communicate with all compliant devices across the whole hardware system, provides the flexibility to develop extensive processor-based systems that consist of multiple processors running on multiple FPGAs implemented across several discrete PCBs.