Intel® Quartus® Prime Standard Edition User Guide: Third-party Simulation

ID 683080
Date 11/07/2022
Public

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1.8. Running a Simulation (Custom Flow)

Use a custom simulation flow to support any of the following more complex simulation scenarios:
  • Custom compilation, elaboration, or run commands for your design, IP, or simulation library model files (for example, macros, debugging/optimization options, simulator-specific elaboration or run-time options)
  • Multi-pass simulation flows
  • Flows that use dynamically generated simulation scripts

Use these to compile libraries and generate simulation scripts for custom simulation flows:

  • NativeLink-generated scripts—use NativeLink only to generate simulation script templates to develop your own custom scripts.
  • Simulation Library Compiler—compile Intel FPGA simulation libraries for your device, HDL, and simulator. Generate scripts to compile simulation libraries as part of your custom simulation flow. This tool does not compile your design, IP, or testbench files.
  • IP and Platform Designer (Standard) simulation scripts—use the scripts generated for Intel FPGA IP cores and Platform Designer (Standard) systems as templates to create simulation scripts. If your design includes multiple IP cores or Platform Designer (Standard) systems, you can combine the simulation scripts into a single script, manually or by using the
ip-make-simscript utility.

Use the following steps in a custom simulation flow:

  1. Use the EDA Netlist Writer (quartus_eda) to generate the design netlist and other output files for use with other EDA tools.
  2. Compile the design and testbench files in your simulator.
  3. Run the simulation in your simulator.

Post-synthesis and post-fit gate-level simulations run significantly slower than RTL simulation. Intel FPGA recommends that you verify your design using RTL simulation for functionality and use the Timing Analyzer for timing. Timing simulation is not supported for Arria® V, Cyclone® V, Stratix® V, and newer families.