Quartus II Installation

This page describes the proceedure for installing the latest version of Quartus II and the version of ModelSim AE that is available along with it.

Check Quartus II Requirements

https://www.altera.com/support/software/download/sof-download_center.html

Download Quartus II

• You may download a Linux or Windows-based Quartus programmer [here]
• In a web browser, browse to ftp://ftp.altera.com/outgoing/release/
• Filenames to look for are of the form "91sp1_quartus_free.exe" if you don't have a license, or "91sp1_quartus_windows.exe" if you have a license.
• Download the latest version of Quartus II (including its library files) to the following directory: http://www.phas.ubc.ca/~scuba2/sc2mce/library/sw_lib

Install Quartus II

• Double click on 'XX_quartus_windows.exe' and follow the extraction and installation instructions.

Quartus II Linux Version

A linux version of Quartus programmer is now available by Altera: [here] Altera claims only to support Redhat/Suse but I think we can fool it. There were two major problems encountered:

Installation

• The installer couldn't communicate with the Quartus web site
  • This was solved by setting up a stupid proxy relayer. I don't know why it was necessary and I don't know why it worked. The relay program is here:

 http://e-mode.phas.ubc.ca/~mhasse/mce/quartus_linux/prox.py

• The installer couldn't find a few commands that typically exist on Fedora systems, notably "arch" and "rpm". Fake versions of these, suitable for tricking the Quartus installer, can be found here (put them in /usr/bin and make them executable):

 http://e-mode.phas.ubc.ca/~mhasse/mce/quartus_linux/rpm
 http://e-mode.phas.ubc.ca/~mhasse/mce/quartus_linux/arch

Once the installation completes, make a script to launch it (this is instead of giving into Quartus's whole path and environment configuration things...). Create and make executable a script in the path, e.g.

sudo touch /usr/local/bin/quartus
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/quartus

And fill it with:

#!/bin/bash
XPWD=`pwd`
cd /opt/altera91/quartus/bin/
./quartus
cd $XPWD

Now you should be able to launch quartus just by typing "quartus" from a terminal.

License Manager

The license file that Altera sent us was incomplete. Change the top few lines from e.g.

SERVER <hostname> 001e90151053 <port number>
VENDOR alterad <path to daemon executable>
VENDOR mgcld <path to daemon executable>
USE_SERVER

to

SERVER mce-ubc-2 001e90151053 1700
DAEMON alterad /opt/altera91/quartus/linux64/alterad
DAEMON mgcld /opt/altera91/modelsim_ase/linux/mgls/lib/mgcld
USE_SERVER

Put the file in /opt/licenses/quartus_001e90151053.dat or something.

In order to get a license manager going, I installed IDL. This is overkill of some kind but it works. The good thing is you don't need an IDL license to get the license manager to work. After installing IDL, the license manager can be invoked as

sudo /usr/local/rsi/idl71/bin/bin.linux.x86_64/lmgrd -c /opt/licenses/quartus_001e90151053.dat

You can put that line (without the sudo) into /etc/rc.local to get it to start whenever the computer boots.

When this works, it should spit out messages like this:

8:38:25 (lmgrd) Started alterad (internet tcp_port 52255 pid 28888)
8:38:25 (lmgrd) Started mgcld (internet tcp_port 54712 pid 28889)
8:38:25 (alterad) FLEXlm version 9.50
8:38:25 (alterad) lmgrd version 11.4, alterad version 9.5

8:38:25 (mgcld) FLEXnet Licensing version v10.8.5.0 build 31891 i86_r6
8:38:25 (mgcld) lmgrd version 11.4, mgcld version 10.8

8:38:25 (mgcld) Server started on mce-ubc-2 for:	alteramtivsim	
8:38:25 (mgcld) 
8:38:25 (mgcld) Licenses are case sensitive for mgcld
8:38:25 (mgcld) 
8:38:25 (mgcld) EXTERNAL FILTERS are OFF
8:38:25 (lmgrd) mgcld using TCP-port 54712
8:38:25 (alterad) Server started on mce-ubc-2 for:	maxplus2	
8:38:25 (alterad) quartus		6AF7_0012	6AF7_0014	
8:38:25 (alterad) 6AF7_0055	6AF7_00A7	6AF7_00A8	
8:38:25 (alterad) 6AF7_00A4	6AF7_0034	6AF7_00AC	
8:38:25 (alterad) 6AF7_00AD	6AF7_00BE	6AF7_00BF	
8:38:25 (alterad) 6AF7_00C2	maxplus2verilog maxplus2vhdl	
8:38:25 (alterad) altera_mainwin_lnx altera_mainwin	6AF8_00A2	
8:38:25 (alterad) 6AF7_00A2