Mercury 2 Programmer

The mercury2_prog application is a command-line utility for programming the Mercury 2 FPGA board via the onboard FT2232H USB-to-serial adapter. It can currently communicate with the S25FL116K (16Mbit), S25FL132K (32Mbit) and S25FL164K (64Mbit) SPI flash chips.

Port A of the FT2232H is used by this application for configuration. Port B is free for user applications. See the Mercury 2 schematic for a detailed look at how the FT2232H is wired to the FPGA and SPI flash.

Usage

• -h or --help prints a help message describing these options
• -l or --list lists all visible FTDI devices, and attempts to find Mercury 2 boards
• -e or --erase erases the entire SPI flash on the Mercury 2
• -r or --read reads the entire SPI flash and saves it to dump.bit
• -w or --write writes to the SPI flash using the specified file. For example: ./mercury2_prog -w test.bit. (Note that this command will automatically erase the required blocks before writing.)

Build

The mercury2_prog application is compiled on Linux using make. This has been tested on Ubuntu 18.04 using gcc 7.4.0 and mingw32-gcc-7.3. The build produces two binaries:

• mercury2_prog - a native x86-64 Linux application
• mercury2_prog.exe - a cross-compiled x86-64 Windows application

Note that you must sudo apt-get install mingw-tools mingw-w64-tools to cross-compile for Windows.

Sample Output

$ ./mercury2_prog -w mercury2_blink.bit
.----------------------------------.
|       MERCURY 2 PROGRAMMER       |
|      (c) 2019 MicroNova LLC      |
|        www.micro-nova.com        |
'----------------------------------'

Reading bitstream file 'mercury2_blink.bit'

Size is 231.8 kBytes = 237345 bytes = 1898760 bits
  928 x 256B pages   (927 whole pages + 33 byte remainder)
   58 x 4kB  sectors (57 whole sectors + 3873 byte remainder)
    4 x 64kB blocks  (3 whole blocks + 40740 byte remainder)

Reading file...
Checking for FTDI devices...3 FTDI devices found
Device 0:
  - Description = 'Mercury FPGA'
  - Serial #    = '77'
  - FTDI Chip   = FT232R @ 12Mbps
  - Opened      = No
Device 1:
  - Description = 'Mercury 2 FPGA A'
  - Serial #    = '100A'
  - FTDI Chip   = FT2232H @ 480Mbps
  - Opened      = No
Device 2:
  - Description = 'Mercury 2 FPGA B'
  - Serial #    = '100B'
  - FTDI Chip   = FT2232H @ 480Mbps
  - Opened      = No

Found Mercury 2 FPGA board at FTDI device 1.
FTDI device 1 opened successfully.
Configuring FTDI for SPI communication...OK
Found flash: S25FL132K 32Mbit

***** WRITING FLASH *****
Erasing block 3 / 3 = 100.0%
Writing page 927 / 927 = 100.0%
Programming time : 2.019 sec
Effective speed  : 114.413 kBytes/sec