Getting ready for the labs
Find a lab partner and register as a group on myCourses. You must be signed up in a group by 5 PM Friday, January 19th.
Once you have a lab partner, go to the Trottier 4th floor equipment desk (4140) to get a DE1-SoC board.
During the first week of labs, the lab rooms will be open in Trottier. You can go to the labs to meet potential lab partners. You can also find a lab partner using the myCourses discussion board.
Where to find the course software
We will use two primary software tools for this course: Quartus Prime 16.1 Lite Edition (only for Lab
and the Intel FPGA Monitor Program. Both tools are available on the lab computers in Trottier. There is a desktop icon for each tool.
You can also download the tools and use them on your own computer if you wish. (Note: the software uses a lot of disk space.)
Quartus II version 16.1 can be found here: http://dl.altera.com/16.1/?edition=lite
The Intel FPGA Monitor Program can be found here (choose version 16.1 and “University Pro-gram Installer”): https://www.altera.com/support/training/university/materials-software.html
Main tasks in this lab
This lab will help identify any software or hardware issues you might face before the actual labs begin. It is very important that you complete this lab!
There are two main tasks in this lab:
Flashing the computer system onto the board. Running the demo program.
Flashing the Computer System to your board
You will be working with the DE1-SoC Computer System for the labs. Part of the Computer System is a hard ARM processor, and the other part is implemented as soft components on the FPGA. It will make your life slightly easier to save the configuration for the FPGA part of the system in the board’s
1
nonvolatile flash memory so that you don’t need to reload it every time you turn the board on.
Use the following instructions to flash the Computer System to your board. A TA will be present in the lab rooms during the first week of labs. If you have trouble getting the board set up, you can ask a TA for help. (The flashing process may not work for older boards.)
