Synthesis guide

From Zet

This guide is a description on how to synthesize Zet with Quartus II in Linux for the Altera board, as this is the OS used for Zet development. You don't need to be root at any moment.

Downloading and installing Quartus II

First, we need to get Quartus II for Linux from the Altera website, which is free of charge and doesn't need any license. To do this:

1. Go to altera.com and then click on the upper right link "Download Center".
2. We search for Quartus II Web Edition (v9.1) and click on Software.
3. We search now for Quartus II Web Edition Software v9.1 Service Pack 2 (Beta) and we click on Download.
4. Now, we can create a one-time access, by entering an email address (any address will work) and the download will start. It's a 2.32 Gb file :) We choose to download it at ~/Downloads for example.
5. Once downloaded, we untar it. So we open a terminal window:

cd ~/Downloads
tar xvf 91sp2_quartus_free_linux.tar
cd quartus_free/
./install   # we need csh installed to get it running

Now we press intro for accepting the normal installation and we write /home/user/opt/altera9.1sp2 as the default target directory. We hit intro twice. After a while, the installation will finish. We can delete now the installation files:

cd ..
rm -fR 91sp2_quartus_free_linux.tar quartus_free

Synthesizing Zet

1. First download the source for the latest version from the main page. Let's say we take the .tar.bz2 version. Let's place it under the ~/Downloads directory.
2. Untar the archive with: cd ~; tar xjvf Downloads/Zet-1.1.1.tar.bz2 considering that v1.1.1 is the latest version.
3. We can launch Quartus II by executing: ~/opt/altera9.1sp2/quartus/bin/quartus. A dialog box will appear, we choose to run Quartus II.
4. Inside the program, we choose to open the file ~/zet-1.1.1/boards/altera-de1/syn/kotku.qpf and we click on the play icon to build the FPGA bitstream. This process will take about 20 minutes and it will result with the files kotku.sof and kotku.pof (in directory ~/zet-1.1.1/boards/altera-de1/syn/) for direct configuration and persistent FPGA bitstream config.

Building the BIOS

We need bcc installed. But this is as simple as going to zet-1.1.1/src/bios and type make. This will create the file bios.out which is a 128 Kb of a BIOS for flashing to the board.

Now you can follow the Altera DE1 Installation guide with the files just generated to flash them into the board and boot the system.