fpga
Is it possible to write your own tool to program FPGA boards, or are they locked down to only be programming by the manufacturer's tools?
In other words, can I write my own tool to program/flash a FPGA board which I purchase from a large vendor (say Intel, or Xillix).
I think from your question you already understand this, but for clarification, this is my usual terminology:
So, as you surmise, the system needs a non-volatile device of some sort which you program on the production line. To Clarify your comment on the USB blaster, it is not a chip... it's a "pod", so you'd have one for your programming station, not one per board:
Anyway, back to the non-volatile storage options:
The "Almost-zero-engineering required" approach uses Altera's configuration flash devices, which are JTAG programmable using something like a USB blaster. You just wire them up like the datasheet says, and away you go. They cost more per MBit than other options, though, so are not often used in volume production.
One more usual approach is a "normal" SPI flash chip. The Cyclone user guide configuration section will list some which are compatible with it, and I believe you can also use the Quartus software to program them via the JTAG of the FPGA they are connected to. More engineering involved, checking you have the right device etc. Also, if you are in volume production, you may not want to be using Quartus on the production line, which which case you may have to provide a separate programming header for the flash chip, and some hardware+software to drive that.
If you have a microcontroller in your system (even on another board...) you could connect that up to the FPGA's JTAG or configuration pins and store the FPGA bitstream in the micro's flash. More engineering involved as you have to have some software to "boot" the FPGA. however, it can make in-field upgrades easier, as often the micro is set up to receive software upgrades already, whereas updating the flash when it hangs directly off the FPGA is often an "opening the box" experience!
It's not really possible for the FPGA to exit the start up routine with a corrupted configuration as it confirms the CRC of the configuration after the complete configuration is loaded, but before it tries to start up. If it does not match, then the DONE pin stays low and you can check on what happened by reading the status bits over JTAG.
Since it seems like the configuration is always completing with the DONE pin released and your divided clock output is working, my guess is you may have a metastability issue or initialization issue in your design that you haven't caught yet.
Best Answer
Most FPGA vendors do not share the information necessary to create custom software tools which can compile designs to generate configuration "bitstream" files for the FPGA, or at least not outside of an NDA with a tool vendor who is a strategic partner. There are a few unique cases where enough information has been obtained to make this possible, but for Xilinx or Altera(Intel) you are stuck compiling your design with the vendor's tools or approved 3rd party commercial ones.
However, almost all FPGA vendors do publish Application Notes giving information on how to load a bitstream created by the vendor's approved tools into the FPGA device itself at runtime. A possible exception might be for flash or anti-fuse type FPGA, but for traditional SRAM-based FPGAs, this information is necessary to be competitive in the market because there are many designs where a processor would inject the bitstream after reading it off a disk or storage device.
Modern SRAM-based FPGAs typically support a lot of configuration methods - a slave load from a processor, a master load from a unique or standard SPI flash, JTAG extensions, possible even novel things like USB.
And even vendor-supplied specialized configuration flash chips may come with enough information to create your own tools for programming them.
That said, you generally will have the easiest experience using a vendor's own programming cable/adapter, or a workalike or approved 3rd party option, especially if you want to then do things like use a compiled-in logic analyzer which needs to communicate with the development tools via this cable. However, even there you may have options, for example the tools can sometimes proxy the communication with the programmer over a network, and that may have given someone an opportunity to reverse engineer the protocol and implement their own version.
Putting an FPGA on a custom board tends to be not at all trivial. When just starting out, you'd do best to get an evaluation or experiment board for the FPGA family you are considering. Hopefully this would just take a USB cable, or come with a supported programming adapter cable. Make very sure that the board you buy will be supported by the free tier of the vendor tools!