I
previously wrote an article “Any Replacement For Altera EPCS Devices?” in year
2006. I hope it has helped a lot of
engineers out there. This article serves
the same purpose. I just want to raise the
same awareness here especially if this is your very first time using Altera
FPGAs. You can confidently replace the expensive
EPCQ devices with N25Q serial flash from Micron. The price difference is really huge! Look at price table below. I don’t even need to elaborate more. Prices are quotated from Digikey or Newark
website as of today.
|
Density
|
Altera Part Number
|
Price (USD$)
|
Micron Part Number
|
Price (USD$)
|
|
32Mb
|
EPCQ32SI8N
|
11.00
|
N25Q032A13ESC40G
|
1.08
|
|
64Mb
|
EPCQ64SI16N
|
18.00
|
N25Q064A13ESE40E
|
1.64
|
|
128Mb
|
EPCQ128SI16N
|
30.00
|
N25Q128A13ESE40E
|
1.88
|
|
256Mb
|
EPCQ256SI16N
|
50.00
|
N25Q256A13ESF40G
|
3.06
|
Besides the
cost difference, there is a huge advantage by using N25Q128 or N25Q064. Their packages are both SOIC-8 whereas EPCQ64
and EPCQ128 are only available in SOIC-16 packages as of today. This could save you some board space!
I
personally had tested N25Q128A13ESE40E and N25Q256A13EF840E on hardware to configure
Altera FPGAs in both Active Serial x4 and Active Serial x1 modes. It works fine. No issue for the Quartus II software programmer
to program the POF files into these N25Q devices, too.
