CSE 140L Lab 1 Hardware and Software Introduction

Spring 2007, Professor Cheng, TAs Thomas Weng, Chengmo Yang, Yi Zhu

In this introduction, you will install the Quartus II software on your machine. You will also review the hardware board that is included in your kit.

Step 1 - Download and install Quartus II Software

1.1. Go to http://www.altera.com/products/software/products/quartus2/qts-index.html. This is the webpage for the Quartus II software from Altera. Feel free to read through some of the links to get better acclimated with the program and what it offers. Click on the download link, and download the Quartus II Web Edition (v7.0) software for Windows. You will need to fill out that form. Note, you might as well make an account with them, as this helps when you are applying for the Quartus II license. Note it does take a while for them to email you, less than an hour.

1.2. Install Quartus II software. Go through the installation procedure and install the complete program.

1.3. Run the program. When it prompts you for Look & Feel, choose Quartus II. Next it will prompt you for your license. Go ahead and select the "retrieve Web license" option. Go ahead and fill out the data to retrieve the license. It takes them a while to email the license to you. You can still run the program without a license however, so go ahead and look around. Go through some of the menus and project navigator to get yourself acclimiated to the enviroment. There is an included interactive tutorial that is very useful to run. It is under Help -> Tutorial. You can run it now if you like, but much of it might not make sense to you since many of you have never run an EDA tool before. You might want to run this after you complete this tutorial, so you have a better feel of what's going on.

1.5. Install the license that you received from Altera via E-mail. Follow their instructions to activate your copy.

1.6. Connect board to your computer. The connector requires the parrellel port. If you are using a laptop that does not have one, you will have to either use your desktop or buy a USB to parrallel port converter.

Step 2 - Hardware Review

Let's review the hardware board. Please browse through the included instructional booklet. In particular, you will want to read over the pages describing the EPF10K70 FPGA and the pages describing the push button, the 8 input button switch, and the dual digit 7 segment display. Notice there are two FPGAs on the board. The EPF10K70 is the right one, and that is the one we care about.

Here is a picture of the board:

For this project, these are the parts we care about. We have 10 inputs (push button 1, push button 2, and each of the 8 input switches), and we have 16 outputs (each of those segments is an output, as are the two periods). Please review the instruction booklet to see what these inputs and outputs are actually named. This is important, as when you start designing your own combinational logic, you will refer to these inputs and outputs when you want to target the specific line segment or switch.

Here is a basic logic diagram of the board.

Let's look at the push button. In it's normal state (that is, when you don't touch it), the push button sends an input of 1 to the FPGA. When you push down on it, the input becomes a 0.

Let's examine the 8 input switch now. When the switch input is "up" it sends a value of 1 to the FPGA, and when you push down on the switch input, it sends a value of 0 to the FPGA.

Let's also look at the outputs.

You see there are 16 outputs in all, from Digit 1 Segment A to Digit 2 Segment G. What does that mean? Well let's look at the display segments. The segment display is your typical display for numbers. Your cheap alarm clock will have this format. So let's say we want to turn on certain segments and turn off the others. Well, when the output to that particular segment is 1, nothing will be shown, but when the output is 0, that segment will light up red! So let's say you want to display 5 on digit 2, and nothing on digit 1.

So what do we do? We simply need to set all segments to high, except Digit 2 Segment A, F, G, C, and D. Those segments we set to 0. Thus, we get the 5! This is of course very basic and simple. You will learn how to control these outputs, depending on the inputs, by making combinational logic circuits. Okay that is our quick review of the board. You will learn mode in detail as we go along, such as what it means exactly to set something to low, and to set something to high. But if you are already lost, please review this section until you have a decent idea of what we are talking about.

Note: You might be confused as to why you set the segment to high to turn it off, and to low to turn it on. It just happens to be the way the board is set. This is why it is important to read datasheets, since many times things are reversed from what you think is logical. It would make more sense to have an output of low equal to "off" but in this board, it just happens to be opposite.

At this point, you should be pretty familiar with the hardware. Please refer to the instruction booklet for more details on your board. In the next tutorial, you will learn to use the Quartus II software with the FPGA board.