You may see that the MAX_ERROR LED illuminates red after you power up your Altera® development kit. This is not board failure. Many Altera development kits have a MAX® II or a MAX V CPLD which has a design for Fast Passive Parallel (FPP) configuration using the Parallel Flash Loader (PFL) IP. When the configuration scheme is set to FPP, the PFL tries to configure the FPGA by reading the programming file from the flash memory device attached to the PFL. When the flash memory device is not programmed with any proper programming files for FPGA configuration, the design in the CPLD detects configuration error and turns on the MAX_ERROR LED.
Even if your development kit is a brand-new, the flash memory device may not be preprogrammed with any programming files in some cases.
If you don\'t use FPP configuration, you can ignore MAX_ERROR LED. If you use FPP configuration, program the flash memory device with a proper programming file for FPP configuration. When the FPGA is configured successfully in FPP configuration, the MAX_ERROR will not illuminate.
You can restore the original factory contents or program any programming files to the flash memory device according to respective development kit user guide. You can also program any programming files to the flash memory device using PFL or other methods.