Remote Update Intel® FPGA IP User Guide

ID 683695
Date 8/16/2022
Public

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Document Table of Contents

1.2.1. Remote System Configuration Mode

Remote configuration supports “Direct to application” (DTA) and “Application to Application” update. Remote configuration only supports a 4-byte address scheme so there is no support for devices with densities smaller than 128 Mbit.

Figure 4. Transitions Between Factory and Application Configurations in Remote Update Mode

The CRC check on the application image is done taking only image data into consideration. Dummy bytes in programming files are not taken into account during CRC checks.

When you use low-voltage quad-serial configuration (EPCQ-L) devices, the remote update mode allows a configuration space to start at any flash sector boundary. This capability allows a maximum of 512 pages in the EPCQ-L256 device and 1024 pages in the EPCQ-L512 device, in which the minimum size of each page is 512 kilobits (Kb). Additionally, the remote update mode features an optional user watchdog timer that can detect functional errors in an application configuration.

Note: When error occurs, the AS controller will load the same application configuration image for three times before reverting to factory configuration image. By that time, the total time taken exceeds 100ms and violates the PCIe boot-up time when using CvP configuration mode. If your design is sensitive to the PCIe boot-up requirement, Intel recommends that you do not use the direct-to-application feature.
Note: Intel recommends that you set a fixed start address and never update the start address during user mode. You should only overwrite an existing application configuration image when you have a new application image. This is to avoid the factory configuration image to be erased unintentionally every time you update the start address.
Note: The fallback to the factory image does not work when the last 576 bytes of the application image bitstream are corrupted. Intel recommends that you examine the last 576 bytes of the application image before triggering the application image configuration.