Altera PCI Express Development Kit, Stratix II GX Edition Getting Started - Manual (Page 9)

Altera Corporation Getting Started User Guide 2–1
March 2008 PCI Express Development Kit, Stratix II GX Edition
2. Getting Started
Introduction The PCI Express Development Kit, Stratix II GX Edition is a complete PCI
Express prototyping and testing kit based on the Stratix II GX device.
With this kit, you can perform device qualification testing, memory read
and write transactions to the board, read the various configuration and
direct memory access (DMA) registers, and use the DMA engine in the
example design to write to system DDR2 memory.
In addition to providing a PCI Express development board, the kit also
includes all of the hardware and software development tools, as well as
the documentation and accessories you need to begin developing PCI
Express systems using the Stratix II GX device.
This user guide will familiarize you with the contents of the kit and guide
you through the PCI Express development board setup. Using this guide,
you can do the following:
■ Inspect the contents of the kit
■ Install the development tool software
■ Set up licensing
■ Use the demo application and example design to:
● Perform memory read and write transactions on the board
● Read configuration and DMA registers
■ Use the development software to:
● Set up and prepare new application designs
● Program new designs into the development board
Before You
Begin Before using the kit or installing the software, be sure to check the kit’s
contents and inspect the board to verify that you received all of the items
listed in this section. If any of the items are missing, contact Altera before
you proceed.
You should also verify that your computer hardware and software meet
the kit’s system requirements. To develop PCI Express applications,
Altera recommends using two computers:
■ Computer #1, as the PCI Express host system, to communicate with
the board and to support the graphical user interface (GUI) for the
demonstration application.
■ Computer #2, as the development host for application development
and to support programming of the PCI Express development board.