Why do I see HPS boot failures with memory or ECC errors on my Intel® Arria® 10 SoC design?

Due to a problem in the Intel® Quartus® Prime Standard and Pro Edition Software, memory errors may be seen during HPS Boot on Intel® Arria® 10 SoC 270 and 320 density devices causing boot to fail.

Boot Failures and HPS UART output that may be seen:

• Data Abort / Hang during SDRAM ECC Scrubbing:

DDRCAL: Scrubbing ECC RAM (1024 MiB).
#Reboot seen here#

• SDRAM size check failure:

DDR: Running SDRAM size sanity check
DDR: SDRAM size check failed!
### ERROR ### Please RESET the board ###

• Hang when loading Second Stage Boot loader from external flash

Trying to boot from SPI
#Reboot seen here#

• SDRAM ECC Double Bit Error when loading Second Stage Boot loader from external flash
   

A patch is available for u-boot-socfpga v2020.04 to work around this problem. Download the patch and follow the following steps:

1. Update to u-boot-socfpga v2020.04 available from : https://github.com/altera-opensource/u-boot-socfpga
   • See doc/README.socfpga in the u-boot-socfpga tree for the updated flow to import Intel® Quartus® Prime Software design handoff information into u-boot.
2. Apply patch 0001-PATCH-spl-socfpga-Enable-double-peripheral-RBF-confi.patch.
3. Build u-boot-socfpga as normal.