Hello,
I want to use an USB Blaster cable for rapid FPGA prototyping on the MPS2+.
The cables differ very much in price. Is it recommended to buy an original Altera for over 200 Euro or can I use a cheaper nonamee one?
Could you please recommend a cable and an distributor (I am living in Germany) ?
Best regards,
Rainer
Hi Rainer,
For MPS2/MPS2+ there is no need to use USB Blaster cable. The board has a microcontroller and a microSD card on it, and when the board is connected to a computer with USB, it appear as a USB mass storage device. You can then copy the FPGA image to the board (microSD card), restart, and the microcontroller will take the FPGA image and program it to the FPGA.
regards,
Joseph
Hi Joseph,
yes I know. But programming with the USB blaster is more convenient because it can be done without leaving Quartus. A second reason is that I want to encrypt the bit stream and for that I must write the encryption key via the JTAG interface.
Best regards,Rainer
I see.
I don't know the answer regarding purchasing of USB Blaster from Germany. However, the following discussion might be useful:
https://community.arm.com/processors/designstart/f/discussions/9008/program-mps2-directly-with-quartus-programmer/30041#30041
Well, that's also a post started by myself :-)I think, I will invest about 200 Euro and buy an original Altera USB II blaster. I will post here, if its working fine or not.
Thanks, Rainer
Ooops, sorry! I didn't spot that you were the person who asked the other question. :-)
I apologise.
You can get similar cable from Terasic. I think it is 50USD.
I have used that cable to configure my custom M3 port on Altera FPGA board.
Hi,
For many Altera old boards you can buy a cheap JTAG cable from Amazon or Aliexpress. It costs 5$. You can see how it works in this Altera Quartus tutorial.