USB Blaster III

 Altera Quartus release 24.2 brings some surprising news. The installation includes DLL files with "blaster3" in the filename, so the USB Blaster III support is really in the distribution included. There has however been no public announcement yet. The real release of the UB3 is planned for Quartus version 24.3, so this is the time when it will be announced. 

UB3 is based on FTDI's FT4232H chip. For onboard solutions, FT2232H can also be used. A single RGB LED is used for status. Integration schematics will be made public. No license or fee is required; anyone can use the onboard UB3 solution.

As of today USB-Programmer2 von Trenz Electronic uses UB3 compatible circuitry. For some reason Quartus 24.2 still does not recognize this programmer without Arrow DLL's, so we all need to wait 24.3 release.

LiteX test on CR00103

This is a quick and dirty guide about the process of how I got Litex to work on CR00103 board.

I have to admit that I have not generated any LiteX SoC designs lately. But I had some known working projects, so to start I did take the top.v and mem init files from one of the old known working projects.

Creating a new Radiant project and selecting the device. Adding files. I am copying the VexRiscv_min file also in a local folder so it is easily found in the project. 

Creating PIN constraints. Done.

Well not yet there, the top.v I am using requires 100MHz clock, and I only have 12MHz on CR00103. So starting IP Wizard and generating PLL named mypll.

Changing the top verilog to use newly created wire clk100 and adding at the end:

    mypll __(.clki_i(clk ),

        .clkop_o(clk100 ));

Done. Does it work?

And indeed Litex is booting well. You can see how old the LiteX project is from January 2022.

Maybe I should give LiteX another try and regenerate directly from CR00103. I kind of did give up updating the LiteX board's support when many incompatible changes happened to LiteX. But I guess it is more stable now as a lot of time has passed.

Ah, let us publish the code, so others can experiment as well. Done, here:

https://github.com/micro-FPGA/CRUVI/tree/master/carriers/CR00103/test_litex