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A total FPGA noob here so be gentle please.

I have a Cyclone 10 CL006 connected to a microcontroller.
Want to load it by a "Fast Passive Parallel" method.
My FPGA engineer sent two files: .sof and .rpd. The .rpd sounds like suitable for the task.
Do I send the .rpd file to the FPGA as is, or it has some header to skip?

The documentation says to make two more clock pulses after pushing the file data so it starts configuring. Do I keep clocking until it raises CONF_DONE and INIT_DONE? or just make these two clocks and wait?

Asking because have tried to send the .rpd as is; of course it won't start running. The FPGA engineer loads the .sof file over JTAG, and it works. Is this because the .rpd is a wrong format, or something else is screwed up?

Progman
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ddbug
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1 Answers1

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Take a look in section "6.1.3. Fast Passive Parallel Configuration" at page 126 of "Intel® Cyclone® 10 LP Core Fabric and General Purpose I/Os Handbook".

This says that the file format must be Raw Binary File (.rbf), Hexadecimal (Intel-Format) File (.hex), or Tabular Text File (.ttf) formats, so Raw Programming Data File (.rpd) is not the format to use.

Guide to convert from .sof to .rbf can be found in How do I generate Raw Programming Data (.rpd) files ..., though the headline says .rpd file the method is applicable, just change the output file format.

Otherwise take a look at this answer How to generate .rbf files in Altera Quartus?

Morten Zilmer
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    Thank you, the rbf file did it! Hex dumps of these look very similar, but the rbf file is almost *3 longer than rpd. – ddbug Jan 05 '20 at 16:32
  • See [How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users?](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592/how-much-research-effort-is-expected-of-stack-overflow-users). This answer is effectively saying 'If you had read the *correct* manual...' (and the bounty was deducted when posted earlier today). –  Jan 05 '20 at 20:05
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    Fair to say, the programming file formats is a jungle, so it actually also gave me some insight getting feedback that at the format worked :-) – Morten Zilmer Jan 05 '20 at 21:44