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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-19T11:56:52+00:00

At my job, I was tasked with making a prototype of a new audio

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At my job, I was tasked with making a prototype of a new audio device. The heart of the prototype will be an Analog Devices, Inc. Ez-Board with a SHARC 21469 chip.

Using VisualDSP++ 5.0, I wrote the necessary software in C, and it runs perfectly now. But I only know how to download the program into RAM using VisualDSP++ and the JTAG emulator.

I have been trying to figure out how to program the flash memory on the Ez-Board so that any time the board powers up, it will run my C program. How does that work?

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  1. Editorial Team

    I figured this out.

    First, in VisualDSP++, under the “Tools” menu, there is a nice GUI for programming flash memory. However, different hardware platforms need different code to do the flash programming, so the GUI is designed to take a “plugin” program that will do the actual flash programming. The Analog Devices Inc. term for this plugin is a “driver”. So, before you do anything else, you need to set the correct plugin for flash programming; you do this on the first “tab” of the flash programmer tabbed dialog (the “Driver” tab). Choose the correct driver .dxe file and click on the “Load” button.

    Since I am using the 21469 Ez-Board, the “plugin” is available from the sample code for that board. Here is the full pathname of the driver file:

    c:\Program Files\Analog Devices\VisualDSP 5.0\214xx\Examples\ADSP-21469 EZ-Board\Flash Programmer\Parallel\21469EzFlashDriver_Parallel.dxe

    With that done, you can now build a “loader” file instead of the usual executable. Open your code project in VisualDSP++, and go to the Project Options dialog (Alt+F7). From the “Project” page, change “Type:” from “Executable file” to “Loader file”. An “executable file” has the extension “.dxe” while a “loader file” has the extension “.ldr”. There are some options that control how the .ldr file is built, but the defaults work fine (at least they did for me with an Ez-Board).

    Now build your project as usual. Instead of building a .dxe file, it will build a .ldr file.

    Finally, choose “Tools/Flash Programmer…” to bring up the flash programming GUI, and click on the second tab in the tabbed dialog, “Programming”. For some reason the loader file is called the “data” file on this page of the dialog. Choose your .ldr file for programming, and hit the “program” button.

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