JTAG communication

[AmitKaria2k]

All,

I have a motor control board with me with Altera FPGA on it. Currently I program the FPGA with firmware using RS485 communication. However this is very slow & I need to use JTAG communication for faster programming. I could not get any article as to how communication can be made to a FPGA using JTAG & Labview (I have LV 8.5). I have an Altera Byteblaster with me that hooks up to the USB port of desktop. Can anyone suggest programming method using LV & JTAG? Are there any ready drivers that can be used?

I saw LV FPGA & embedded toolkit but it seems like they target only LV FPGA cards

Pls suggest

Thanks in advance

Amit

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I do not believe that LV FPGA can target third-party FPGA boards or Altera FPGAs (at least as of 8.5.x)

The current LV FPGA targets as of this posting use Xilinx FPGAs and the Xilinx compiler.

Doug

[AmitKaria2k]

Hi Doug,

Thanks for the post ..Isn't there any VI that can help me without purchasing FPGA toolkit?

[Doug_S]

If you just want to program the FPGA, the easiest way would be to use Altera's software to program it via the ByteBlaster.

If you must program it from LabVIEW, you may be able to create a LabVIEW wrapper to call Altera's software using DLL, ActiveX, or EXE command line calls (depending on what the byteblaster software supports).

I tried a quick Google search, but it did not uncover any examples. If you figure out a way to do this, please let us know.

[AmitKaria2k]

Hi Doug,

This is what I'm gonna implement by calling Altera's application from LabVIEW. The FPGA programmers are working on it to make an exe with command line interface. I thought of directly programming the FPGA from LabVIEW instead of calling exe since I needed Labview - FPGA interface for other projects as well

[Henrik@CTH]

Hi amitkaria,

If you ever find a way of using LV (/FPGA) with Altera or other third party FPGA's pls let us know!

Programming generic FPGA's w/ LV, now that is interesting!

[sjuno]

there's a little video here I found showing labview VIs being used to program FPGAs and test stuff

http://www.intellitech.com/products/labview.asp

From the website, it says their JTAG hardware uses the NI 6533 PCI/PXI and PCMCIA as an interface.