Downloading is NOT Required
Quartus Prime is installed on most engineering lab computers. It is
quite practical to do all your Quartus Prime work on one of
Dordt's computers. It is not necessary for you to download it
and install it on your personal computer, but Intel offers
you permission to do so.
Quartus Prime is a big program
Altera offers the "Lite Edition 18.1" of Quartus Prime for free.
You need a Windows 7, Vista, or XP computer with about
15 GB of free space on your hard drive. (That's quite a
lot in comparison to most programs.) It is not unusual for
this download to take more than 5 minutes, sometimes hours more,
even on a fast Internet connection.
The Lite Edition is Full (enough) Featured
The Web Edition it has all the features and capabilities of the
Subscription Editions except that it does not support the newest
and most powerful FPGA hardware, it cannot do incremental
compilation, and some other capabilities that we will not use in
this course. For the purposes of this course, you would never
be able to tell the difference between the Lite Edition and
the Subscription Edition.
Use The Correct Version
Quartus Prime Lite Edition Version 18.1 is recommended for
this course. It is available for Windows 7 (64-bit only) and
newer versions of Microsoft Windows and several versions
of Linux (KDE desktop required for Linux).
Start Downloading
If you have a campus network connection you can try
downloading from Dordt's server. Open "My Computer" and
aim it at F:/classes/egr/204/Intel/quartus_lite_18p1.exe.
Copy that file to your computer's desktop or some other
place on your local hard drive where you can easily find
the copy. This is much faster than using the Web, but
generally only works on Dordt-owned computers on campus.
Expect this download (the copy operation) to take about
5 minutes. Otherwise, download directly from Intel's server.
Click on the Quartus Prime logo—the image above—to
get to Intel's download page. The version installed on Dordt's
computers has all available options installed. For this
course, when the download options are displayed you may save
download time by unselecting all options in the "Devices"
category except "Cyclone V device support." Even having done
this, expect this download to take 15 minutes on a very fast
connection, or maybe hours on a typical connection subject
to network congestion. Once you have the installation file
on your computer, run the file. The remainder of the
installation procedure is typical of any Windows program.
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