User guide

Altera Corporation 9

Getting Started

Introduction

The EPXA1 development kit contains everything you need to develop

complete embedded systems on a programmable chip. It contains the

EPXA1 development board featuring the Excalibur

™

EPXA1 device.

For more details about the EPXA1 device, refer to the Excalibur Devices

Hardware Reference Manual.

The EPXA1 development kit also contains example reference designs. The

designs demonstrate the interfaces and applications possible for system-

on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) designs and serve as platforms for

creating new designs.

The design example referenced in this guide is a simple implementation

of a Hello World program that can be used as a template for your own

applications. The Hello World program is commonly one of the first

applications an engineer writes when developing software code for a new

processor: successfully building and executing it on the processor

validates the tool chain for developing embedded software. For the

Excalibur devices, a successful build and execution also validates the

hardware configuration of the device and the programmable logic.

The Altera version of the Hello World program prints a message to a

terminal window and scrolls the LEDs on the EPXA1 development board.

The hardware and software source code is provided, which may be useful

as the basis for developing additional applications.

Software and Hardware Requirements

The following list summarizes the hardware and software development

tools needed to build and run the example design in the

Windows NT/2000 environment:

■ The Excalibur utilities

■ The Quartus

II software, version 2.2

■ Either of the following:

– Red Hat GNUPro Toolkit for ARM

– ARM Developer Suite for Altera (ADS-Lite) software version 1.1

■ EPXA1 development board