Altera's "Active serial" - is it really a plain SPI ?

[rob77]

Hi Guys,

i started to play with FPGAs once again.. and designing myself a nice test board with a cyclone IV GX , i almost ordered a pair of EPCS16 serial config memories (ridiculously expensive for the given 16Mbit capacity - almost 20eur@farnel and 11eur@TME) but fortunately i noticed that the devel board i bought recently has a winbond SPI serial flash for config.
is the "active serial" config interface really just a plain SPI ? so can i use any SPI flash which is fast enough ? e.g. GD25Q16CSIG - supports single, dual, quad , 120MHz... should be good enough and it's 50cents for 16Mbit.

[Scrts]

Hi Guys,

i started to play with FPGAs once again.. and designing myself a nice test board with a cyclone IV GX , i almost ordered a pair of EPCS16 serial config memories (ridiculously expensive for the given 16Mbit capacity - almost 20eur@farnel and 11eur@TME) but fortunately i noticed that the devel board i bought recently has a winbond SPI serial flash for config.
is the "active serial" config interface really just a plain SPI ? so can i use any SPI flash which is fast enough ? e.g. GD25Q16CSIG - supports single, dual, quad , 120MHz... should be good enough and it's 50cents for 16Mbit.

You can easily use Winbond or any other brand. We've tried Winbond and Spansion - both worked OK, except Spansion memory required some Quartus configuration tricks.

[rob77]

thanks for the reply, going to order them and give it a try - the dev board i purchased recently is the cheap ZR tech with cyclone IV E , so will test the flash chip on that one. if it will work , then i assume it will have to work with the cyclone IV GX as well.