Programming System Flash on Altera-based boards

1

I’m looking for some additional information on programming the System Flash on Altera-based boards (i.e. ZEM4310). The documentation is very Xilinx-specific in many cases, so I’d like to get some additional info before I start randomly program the flash

  1. The documentation says that it should be programmed with a.'bit file. The Altera equivalent of this would be the .sof file. On the other hand, I’m using an rbf file when I’m running ConfigureFPGA(). Is it the .sof or the .rbf that should be programmed to System Flash?

  2. For the programming itself, Is it just to start FrontPanel, select the system Flash, choose the file and set start sector to 16, or do I need to do anything else in addition to this?

2

You’ll want to use rbf files with all FrontPanel software, it’s a binary format that is a lot easier to work with than sof files.

As for 2, that should be all you need to do. Make sure that when programming the system flash you select “Configuration” instead of “Raw” for the data. Selecting the “configuration” option will make FrontPanel automatically set up a reset profile to program the FPGA at startup (you can verify this in the Device Settings window).

3

We have updated the FrontPanel documentation with a bit more exposition to describe this process.