Third Party Boards - Testing a Connected Board

To test that the third party board (and device thereon) has been correctly detected, open the FPGA project that you configured for the board, then open the relevant Devices view (View » Devices Views). If the target FPGA has been correctly specified in the configuration and can be detected on the board, an image of the device will appear.

As an example, Figure 1 shows the resulting display for the Hard Devices JTAG chain when an Altera Nios Stratix10 Development Board is connected to the PC (and detected by the software) containing a Stratix 10 FPGA device (EP1S10F780C6ES).

Figure 1. Successful detection of the physical device on a third party development board.

Note: If the development board is connected indirectly via a NanoBoard, the physical device on any plugged-in daughter board will be detected also, unless the daughter board is removed.

To test correct operation of both the Hard and Soft Devices JTAG chains, simply process and download the design to the physical device on the board. As the programming file is downloaded to the device, the progress will be shown in the Status bar.

Once successfully downloaded, the text underneath the icon for the device will change from Reset to Programmed. You can, if desired, specify a specific user code ID for the device, by entering a dedicated hex code in the User ID Code for FPGA field, on the Options tab of the Options for FPGA Project dialog. By default, the entry in this field will be oxFFFFFFFF, which will yield Programmed in the Devices view when the device is successfully programmed. This is especially useful when your board has multiple FPGA devices of the same type and you want to easily distinguish which device is which from within the Devices view.

When a specific ID code is defined, upon successful programming of a device the text underneath the device's icon will change from Reset to User-Code: n (Figure 2), where n is the corresponding ID defined for that device.

Figure 2. Successful programming of the physical FPGA device (User ID code used).

If the Soft Devices JTAG chain is working correctly, any Nexus-enabled devices on the Soft Devices chain (in the Devices view) will be presented and display as 'Running' (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Soft Devices running after successful program download.