ECE241F - Digital Systems - Access to CAD Software
The lab in this course depends heavily on the use of CAD software to implement the circuits, usually on a programmable logic device. We will be using Complex Programmable Logic Devices (CPLDs) and FPGAs from Altera, and Altera’s Quartus II Version 3.0 CAD software.
You will be able to access this software in one of five ways:
If you have a Windows NT, 2000, or XP-based home computer with at least 256 MBytes of physical RAM. Note that Windows 98 is not supported.
In class, we will supply a CD ROM which contains the Quartus II 3.0 Web edition software. Alternatively, you can download the Quartus II 3.0 Web edition directly from the Altera web site (the download file size is 143.6Mbytes):
https://www.altera.com/support/software/download/altera_design/quartus_we/dnl-quartus_we.jsp
You will
have to go to the following web page to obtain a license file:
http://www.altera.com/cgi-bin/authcode91.pl?where_am_i=product&product=q2_web_nic_id
To do
that, you will need to obtain the NIC ID (also known as the MAC address) of the
network card in your computer. You can
obtain this address/ID by opening a DOS window and typing the command:
ipconfig /all
In the
output of this command look for the line that reads something like:
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . :
00-B0-D0-87-FC-48
The NIC
address is the number above without the dashes. (i.e.
00B0D087FC48 for the above example).
Once you enter this and other information at the registration site,
Altera will email you a license.dat file. Store this file on your machine, and then start the Quartus
program. Go to the Tools menu
and select License Setup. In the
top window, enter the full path of your license.dat file.
In the lab we will be using the full version of the software, but web edition has all you need as well.
There are a total of 100 2.2 GHz 500Mbyte Windows 2000-based machines in these Bahen Centre labs. These will have the latest release of the full-blown Altera software installed on them. These machines will have access to your home directory on the ECE ugsparc system.
The Unix version of the full-blown Quartus is installed on the ECE ugsparc system, in Room GB251. Your account on that system has the same name and password as your ECF account from last year. If you do not have an ECF account, you’ll need to request one at the ECF office.
To start quartus on the EECG ugsparcs, type:
quartus.start
Quartus is not directly available on the ECF Unix and Linux systems. However, you can remotely login to one of the ugsparc machines (on Unix using the ssh ugsparcXX.eecg command, where XX is an appropriate ugsparc number). Once logged in, you have to set the display that the ugsparc machine uses in the following way:
setenv
DISPLAY p22.ecf:0.0
Here you should replace p22.ecf with the name of the ECF machine you are sitting at.
5.
On the ECF PC Systems
Quartus is available on the ECF Windows PC systems.