By Kent Zetterberg
One of the greatest challenges for designers and manufacturing engineers today is how to cost-effectively program flash and EEPROM memory at-speed after the devices have been soldered down onto a printed circuit board.
Software and firmware changes typically occur multiple times during design, so programming memory in-system without depopulating the board is critical. And, while we’re at it, you’d probably like to do this without an operating system running and without much physical access to the board. Finally, when it comes time for manufacturing the board, you really need to program as fast as possible for cost savings.
There are actually several solutions you can choose from. We recently published a new eBook that discusses how you can use boundary-scan/JTAG methods with an FPGA that’s already on the board.
