DNA IDs, donor profiles, and how to flash the card without bricking its FPGA.
Firmware is what makes the card visible to the gaming PC at all. These pages explain the DNA ID that binds an image to one board and what a donor profile really claims. They also show how to flash without bricking the FPGA, and how to recover a board that will not enumerate.
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Put the .bin in the CH347FPGATool folder. Run CH347FpgaDownloadTool.exe with the cable in the card's JTAG port. Select xc7a75t or xc7a100t to match your board. Set the file format to BIN before you program. On success, power-cycle the game PC, move the cable to the data port and run a connection test.
A donor profile is the identity of a real PCIe device. Your card writes it into the shadow config space and shows that to the host. It holds the vendor ID, the device ID, the subsystem IDs, the BAR layout and the capability list. A plausible donor reads like normal hardware. A generic one, or one shared by many cards, is a pattern anyone can enumerate.
The DNA ID is a 57-bit, read-only value burned into each Xilinx 7-series FPGA at the factory. Logic reads it through the DNA_PORT primitive. Custom firmware is built against that value, so the image runs on one board only. It is not a licence key, and it holds no information about you.
A card that stops enumerating after a flash is almost never dead silicon. At power-on the FPGA loads its bitstream from SPI flash. A bad image means configuration never completes, so no PCIe endpoint appears. But JTAG does not depend on what is in the flash, so the fix is almost always a reflash.
Pick the tier by the anti-cheat your game runs, not by price. Emulated covers the listed EAC and BattlEye titles. Slotted adds the Ricochet and ACE workflows, plus M.2 support. Slotted v2 is the Fortnite tier. Signature and Sovereign are the FaceIt and Vanguard tiers, built from per-order donors.
Firmware is rebuilt when the thing it has to look ordinary to changes. That means an anti-cheat driver update, a new scan or detection vector, or a board revision. Nothing in this stack lasts forever. Treat firmware as a maintained thing with replacement cover. It is not a one-time purchase.
Firmware is built against one card's DNA ID. It cannot be moved to another board. Selling a card does not transfer a usable entitlement. The image does not expire on a clock, and a Windows update does not call for a reflash. It is the identity layer only — not the cheat, and not a safety guarantee.