Introduction
Nice to meet you, I'm KURAMII, a newcomer.
I am mainly in charge of FPGA-related articles together with Namiie.
I would like to write various articles related to FPGAs, focusing on what I did not understand or wondered about during the production training.
For this production exercise, we used Intel's (formerly Altera's) Cyclone® IV FPGA (EP4CE10E22C8).
One day, two weeks later, I had a question: "FPGAs have a lot of pins.
One day, after two weeks, I had a question: "FPGAs have a lot of pins, but what should I put on which pins?
I asked one of my seniors, who told me that I could find out by looking at Altera's website, and I immediately looked into it.
Explanation of pin assignments using Quartus® Prime
First, go to Intel's website and click on DOCUMENTATION under Support & Resources.
Click on Pin-Outs in the More Device Documentation column.
I looked at the EP4CE10 used in this project and found PDF and Excel files. I downloaded the Excel file.
When I opened the file, it showed me all the information about which pins have what functions...!
This sheet is easy to understand because you can see a list of pins that can be used as dedicated pins or user I/O.
Since we are using a 144-pin device, we can compare the pin numbers listed in the E144 column with the Pin NAME / Function column to see which pin has what function. For example, in the example below, pin 6 is an I/O pin, and the user can place any function he/she likes on it.
Pin 14 has a function called nCONFIG.
nCONFIG is one of the configuration-related pins. nCONFIG is a function pin that starts configuration by transitioning from LOW to HIGH.
In addition, you can check the location of other pins required for configuration, such as nSTATUS, DCLK, and DATA0.
You can also filter the pins by using the checkboxes in the red box in the figure below.
Now that we know which pins of the FPGA have what role, we can proceed with the pin assignment.
So how do we actually go about pinning using Quartus Prime...
And what should we do with the pins we don't use...?
In the next article, we will show you how to solve such questions.
Please also check out " FPGA Pin Assignment Part 2 ".
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