Making Altera/Intel onboard JTAG myself ?

[kilohercas]

Hello,

I am making very versatile board for future projects with STM32F429 or STM32F7 series MCU connected with 26b adr and 32b data bus to altera max10  FPGA (50k cels  and 484 pins), 512Mb 32b SDRAM, coupled with hardware LAN with w5300, on-board USB hub for FTDI-> SPI converter, ST-Link programmer,, as well as one channel connected to ARM USB pins.

Problem is JTAG. I have disassembled and made circuit for terasic USB blaster, but they are using obsolete chips just like original altera jtag.

Now why the hell altera is not making jtag by using FTDI chip itself? It does support JTAG, so why not just implement it, and use single chip ? Does any one know how i can implement USB Blaster that can work with quartus software from chips that can be bayed in digikey ? I did some research , but was unable to find good solution for this problem, maybe others did something similar ?

I will have lot of spare unpopulated boards afterwards

[technix]

There are USB Blaster clones implemented using a single STM32F103. Maybe you can look that way? (p.s. The MCO pin on your STM32 can be used to clock your FPGA, saving you a few cents for the crystal.

[Scrts]

I never saw a reason to have on-board JTAG. Why do you need that? You use JTAG in development, so USB cable is OK for that and then only in production and only once.

[technix]

I never saw a reason to have on-board JTAG. Why do you need that? You use JTAG in development, so USB cable is OK for that and then only in production and only once.

Actually the onboard MCU-based JTAG can double as an onboard general purpose MCU after the development phase. Also if you are using SRAM-based FPGA this MCU can perform the loading of FPGA code in place of the usual SPI flash, and thus you can deploy usual MCU OTA update technique on the FPGA too by packaging the FPGA code update as part of the MCU firmware update.

[BrianHG]

If you are willing to write your own JTag programming utility (I had a Cyclone III bootprom update utility which ran in the PC in the background & waited for a universal hot-key combination which auto-self-programmed my firmware through an Ethernet-port on the Cyclone III), any small USB MCU where all you have to do is read & write the IOs from your PC app will work.  FTDI already has a USB2.0 chip that does this, all your coding will be on the PC.  Quartus does provide the chain description files and programming map files.  Now, integrating this home-brew programmer into Quartus or making it directly internally compatible is a completely different story.