INSTRUCTIONS FOR DOWNLOADING
Quartus II
FOR USE IN CONNECTION WITH EGR 204
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 5 minutes, sometimes hours 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 (Also known simply as
version 9.1 or version 91) 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 12.<something> or higher. The older version
is best for work assigned in this course for three reasons.
the latest version 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.
Considering the effect of this on backups in Dordt College's
networked environment, this is a significant waste of
storage space.) 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 12.1 that we could
benefit from.
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/304/Altera/91sp2_quartus_free.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 91_quartus_free.exe
directly from Altera's server. Click on the Quartus II
logo—the image above to get to Altera's download
page. Expect this download to take at least 15 minutes
on a very fast connection, or maybe hours on a typcial
connection subject to Internet network congestion.
Once you have the intallation file on your computer,
run the file. The installation procedure is typical of
any Windows program.