ALTERA MAX+plus II INTRODUCTION
(note this page is still under construction)
The following document is a brief, example based introduction to Altera MAX+plus II for either version 7.2 Student Edition or the 8.1 Commercial version which are both available in the EE 552 lab located in CEB 342. It will cover everything from the start to the finish and actual downloading to the UP1 Board.
The help file is extremely good at describing most of the functions of MAX+plus II. It has been our experience that you will be using this a lot in your everyday activities and should spend sometime becoming familiar with how to search for information and how the interface of the help files work. All of the help files can be obtained by going to the Help menu and selecting whichever particular function you are interested in. If something on the screen is currently highlighted or is currently selected you can press F1 in order to obtain more information. This is especially useful when you are in the text editor and you want to get further information on a key word. If you highlight the keyword (select it) and press F1 a help screen on the select key word will appear, this screen includes function, usage, as well as other related topics to that particular function.
Another observation that we have made is that there is quite a difference in the VHDL implemented by MAX+plus II and Mentor Graphics. Mentor Graphics tends to adhere more closely to the standards as well as to the reference books we have. It is because of this that we decided that all of our development is going to be done using MAX+plus II. That way we do not have to contend with the possibility that our code may work fine under Mentor Graphics, but has to be heavily modified in order to work under MAX+plus II.
This document is split up into several parts:
Due to time constraints there is a possibility that there are errors in these documents. If you find any errors in these pages please contact Mark Fedorak.
Mark Fedorak, Vera Casteel, Kris Pucci, Ron Smith - 1998