Creating Target Board Help

[Altera_Forum]

Hi there, 

 We have a design that uses a EP2C35 FPGA and we are having difficulty in making the target board to be used in SOPC Builder.  First off I notice that the way the Target Board was built for the EP2C35 Dev Board uses the peripheral ASMI. why does it use this and not the EPCS_Controller? Also when you select the ASMI it only gives you the option for the EPCS1 or EPCS4. Where is the EPCS16 or EPCS64? Does it matter?  Our application only uses the EPCS64 device to hole the FPGA load as well as the software load and therefore do not have a parallel Flash device connected to it. When we build the Target Board (using the mk_target_board command), we add on the EPCS_Controller as a peripheral. We try this Target Board with our 'real' application and the Flash Programmer in the NIOS IDE comes back witht he message 'unable to sychronise with target'. We then read somewhere that you need to add a tri-state bus as well as a one of the CFI Flash devices (even though we don't have one) to the Target Board design to get things working. we tried this a well to no avail.  I imagine that we are missing some small but important piece of the puzzle. Does anyone have an idea of where we are going wrong? Or point us into a possible direction. Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Realistically, if one's design has the JTAG connection as well as EPCS Configuration device on their board, there really should be no reason why we shouldn't be able to use the eval boards Target Board in SOPC Builder right? We do have SDRAM and other things connected to the FPGA but during the programming of the EPCS device none of these peripherals should really matter. Would this be accurate. We did try this and it doesn't seem to work either.  Regards Todd

[Altera_Forum]

Hi Todd, 

 It is not as difficult as you imagine to make a target board. Just follow the instructions of mk_target_board command till you get the SOPC builder system which is automaticlly generated.  Do not add or remove any component from the SOPC Builder system. You will see the ASMI component, let it be. EPCS controller=ASMI+bootloader, but here you need not EPCS controller. mk_target_board is only needed when using flash programmer under Nios II IDE. It is used to burn your hardware and/or software image to FLASH, and has nothing to do with your "real" application.  If you do want to modify the SOPC Builder system, you can reduce the buffer size because there is maybe an error on the document.  Cheers,