Posts Tagged ‘ Cyclone II ’

SparkFun retires Cyclone II Breakout board

Usually, I would get a few people linking to Idle-Logic from SparkFun’s Cyclone II Breakout board product page. Looking through the logs recently I noticed that this trickle of referrals dried up. I went to investigate only to find that the board has been discontinued… sad times. Down the road I plan on making my [ READ MORE ]

Programming an Altera Cyclone II FPGA with a FT232RL USB to UART Bridge

As I alluded to in a previous post, I’ve come up with a way to program my Altera Cyclone II FPGA with a $15 FT232RL USB to UART Bridge, avoiding the $300 investment in one of Altera’s USB-Blaster cables. I’m going to break this tutorial up into three separate posts. The first has already been [ READ MORE ]

Configuring the Cyclone II

Here is a quick tutorial to demonstrate how to create a new Quartus II HDL project, compile it, then download it to your device. Before we start there are a couple of prerequisites you’ll have to take care of first if you wish to follow along. Obviously, you will need to get your hands on [ READ MORE ]

Cyclone II Breakout Board – “Hello World”

I threw together a quick demo to prove to myself that my FPGA was powered and working. It was important that the demonstration used some form of sequential logic, so that I could be sure the clock was alive and running as well. The ideal quick and easy first project would be to just output [ READ MORE ]

Cyclone II FPGA Clock Selection

Time to take a look at clocks, and what exactly we need for the Cyclone II FPGA. I’ve spent considerable time digging around in different corners of the internet trying to find good advice on selecting a clock for my FPGA without much luck. So, I decided to get my hands dirty and figure it [ READ MORE ]