The Cyclone IV board is a family of FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) devices developed by Altera, a company that is now part of Intel.

These boards are used in various technological fields for their ability to be reprogrammed to perform different complex computational tasks.

To program the board, we will use the Intel Quartus Prime software and program in VHDL.

The first step is to download the project created for the course.

Once the project is downloaded and unzipped, here’s what we get:

All you have to do now is open the project in Intel Quartus Prime:

We can see the program that makes the LEDs on our Cyclone IV blink by double-clicking on “led_twinkle”:

Upload the program to the board

The last step is to download the program to our Cyclone IV board from Intel Quartus Prime. To do this, you need to go to “Program” and then connect your Cyclone IV board to your computer:

Once your board is connected, you can click on “Start” to begin the download to the board. Once the progress bar reaches 100%, you will see the LEDs blinking on the Cyclone IV board: