If you are not familiar with the GEDEK IP, follow this link.

The document below describes all the details on using the Remote Update option of the ALSE Gigabit Ethernet IP to allow you to safely update your Lattice FPGA board(s) through Ethernet, remotely.

To demonstrate the concept and its implementation, we use a very cheap and widely available Board : the Chinese Colorlight 5A-75B board, which implements a Lattice ECP5 FPGA with a Winbond 25Q32JVSIQ 32 Mbits SPI Flash.

Its low price made it very popular to the open source and enthusiasts communities.

This board has very few inputs (one button !) but the ECP5 FPGA is quite powerful with 25k LEs, and there are two Gigabit Ethernet ports (we use one in this application) and an external Ram (that we don’t use).

In this project, we will not use any processor core either, but a simple project which consists essentially in the instantiation of our GEDEK IP with its Remote Update option. The complete design uses a fraction of the FPGA (around 14%) and provides the complete bi-directional Gigabit Ethernet communication feature (capable of loss-less transfer of 2 x 113 Mbytes/s), and indeed the capability to update remotely the memory through Ethernet !

The files archive can be downloaded from here.

The full article is available below.