Hi All,
I am migrating from Spartan 3e to Cyclone III. We bought only cyclone IIIstarter board. We don't have any USB blaster download cable.  I devlopedthe my current design. Now i want to download into FPGA using USB cable. 
What are the steps to follow?

regards,
S Shankaran

shivashankara wrote:
> Hi All,
> I am migrating from Spartan 3e to Cyclone III. We bought only cyclone III
> starter board. We don't have any USB blaster download cable.  I devloped
> the my current design. Now i want to download into FPGA using USB cable. 
> What are the steps to follow?
> 
> regards,
> S Shankaran
> 
> 

I assume that what You do have is officially called "Cyclone III Starter 
FPGA Kit" - right?

There is quite a good step-by-strep guide for a own design at: 
http://nioswiki.jot.com/WikiHome/Cyclone%20III%20-%20Nios%20II%20-%20Starter%20board

You can also have a look at it's greater brother the "Nios II Embedded 
Evaluation Kit, Cyclone III Edition" (you can download an example design 
from Terasic which even includes the SDRam.

For actually downloading the bitfile there are quite a few methods, 
either if Your design features the "remote update" IP-Core via remote 
update or via serial or parallel programming pins which can be reused 
later (see the nioswiki from above for a detailed step-by-step-guide).

Regards,

Lorenz

On Jul 8, 11:12 am, "shivashankara"
<shankaran.si...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
> I am migrating from Spartan 3e to Cyclone III. We bought only cyclone III
> starter board. We don't have any USB blaster download cable.  I devloped
> the my current design. Now i want to download into FPGA using USB cable.
> What are the steps to follow?
>
> regards,
> S Shankaran

"We don't have any USB blaster download cable." - "I want to download
into FPGA using USB cable."

Unless I'm missing something here, step one would be to "Get a USB
download cable."

LittleAlex wrote:
> On Jul 8, 11:12 am, "shivashankara" <shankaran.si...@gmail.com>
wrote:
>> Hi All,
>> I am migrating from Spartan 3e to Cyclone III. We bought only cyclone III
>> starter board. We don't have any USB blaster download cable.  I devloped
>> the my current design. Now i want to download into FPGA using USB cable.
>> What are the steps to follow?
>>
>> regards,
>> S Shankaran
> 
> "We don't have any USB blaster download cable." - "I want to download
> into FPGA using USB cable."
> 
> Unless I'm missing something here, step one would be to "Get a USB
> download cable."

Well, actually if (and only if) he does have a "Cyclone III Starter FPGA 
Kit" (and just did not name it that way) the onboard usb-client port 
together with the onboard clpd have USB Blaster functionality.

Nevertheless he can buy a USB-Blaster or even build such a JTAG cable 
himself (at least for the serial (line printer) port there are numerous 
examples on the internet. Nevertheless I'd suggest using the solution 
one gets for free.

Regards,

Lorenz