Dordt College Engineering & Department

INTRODUCTION TO MICROPROCESSORS AND
DIGITAL CIRCUITS, EGR 204
(Spring 2012)

Downloading is NOT Required
Quartus II is installed on most engineering lab computers. It is quite practical to do all your Quartus II work on one of Dordt's computers. It is not necessary for you to download it and install it on your personal computer, but Altera offers you permission to do so.

Quartus II is a big program
Altera offers the "Web Edition" of Quartus II for free. You need a Windows 7, Vista, or XP computer with about 4.5 GB of free space on your hard drive. (That's quite a lot in comparison to most programs.) The download itself is 1.95 GB. It is not unusual for this download to take more than 15 minutes, sometimes much more, even on a fast Internet connection.

The Web Edition is Full Featured
The Web Edition it has all the features and capabilities of the Subscription Edition except that it does not support the newest and most powerful FPGA hardware, it cannot do incremental compilation, and access to Altera's "intellectual property" (pre-compiled designs) is limited. These restrictions have no effect on the work assigned for this course. For the purposes of this course, you would never be able to tell the difference between the Web Edition and the Subscription Edition.

Use The Correct Version
Quartus II Web Edition Version 9.1sp2 is recommended for this course and will be downloaded if you follow the instructions and links here. The most recent release of Quartus II is version 11.1sp1. The older version is best for work assigned in this course for three reasons. First Version 11.1sp1 supports more hardware than we need. This consumes hard disk space for configuration files that we will never use. (About 12 GB vs 4.5 GB for Version 9.1sp2.) Second, variations in menu structures and features make more recent versions difficult to use with the tutorials and lab handouts that we have. Third, there are no compelling new features in version 11.1sp1 that we could benefit from.

Click the Logo to Start Downloading
To download directly from Altera's FTP server, click on the Quartus II logo (the image above). If you have a campus network connection you can try downloading from Dordt's server This is much faster but generally only works on Dordt-owned computers. Save the download to your desktop or some other location where you can find it again. Then run the file. The installation procedure is typical of any Windows program from there.