Programming the v1495

• burning new firmware in v1495

Generic Info

By the above method we write the firmware on the EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Permanent Read Only Memory) of the FPGA chip. This takes about 5-10 minutes. This firmware is loaded 'permanently'. A faster way to programme is to load the firmware into the Flash Memory using a USB blaster. This happens within 2 seconds. For programming the User (Bridge) FPGA, the USB blaster needs to be connected to the lower (upper) 6 pin male connector on the v1495, the other end of the Blaster connected to the computer through which using a software called Quartus, the *.sof file can be loaded on the flash memory.

A firmware put to the flash memory takes precedence and gets loaded on the User FPGA rather than the one stored in the permanent memory. After burning a code to the flash memory, if the crate is rebooted, the firmware loaded in the permanent memory gets loaded again.

Possible Errors

• if after running the v1495firmware function while burning the firmware into EEPROM, if
  • the memory address to which you are loading this firmware does not have a v1495 or
  • the hardware address of the v1495 for which the VME bus address was obtained is not in the same crate/CPU, as the one from which it is trying to be programmed.

Then the following message is received back on the terminal.

 Updating firmware of the FPGA USER with the file v1495cp_16bit_r2006.rbf
 [ 16] written 0x56, read back 0xff -> Flash writing failure (byte 16 of page 48)
 !
 Firmware not loaded !
 Task not found