Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition User Guide: Design Recommendations

ID 683082
Date 8/03/2023
Public

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2.3.3.1. Clock Region Assignments in Intel® Stratix® 10 Devices

In Intel® Stratix® 10 devices, clock networks are constructed using programmable clock routing. As with other Intel® device families, you can use Clock Region assignments for floorplanning, controlling the size and location of each clock tree.

Although the Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition software generates balanced clock trees, there are sources of timing variation, such as process variation and jitter, which prevents clock trees from being perfectly skew balanced. Longer paths, with higher insertion delay, have more timing variation. However, the Timing Analyzer can account for and eliminate some sources of variation in timing along common clock paths. In practice, this means that the size of the clock region has a significant impact on the worst-case skew of the clock tree; a larger clock tree experiences higher insertion delay and worst-case clock skew when compared to a smaller clock region. The distance between the clock region and the clock source also increases insertion delay, but the impact of distance on worst-case clock skew is much smaller than the impact of the size of the clock region.

One case to consider is when a design contains high-speed clock domains that are expected to grow during the design process. Specifying a clock region constraint to create a larger clock region than the compiler generates automatically helps ensure that timing closure is robust with higher clock insertion delays and clock skews.

An additional design consideration is the minimum pulse width constraint on clock signals. For a clock signal to propagate correctly on the Intel® Stratix® 10 clock network, a minimum delay must be met between the rising edge and falling edge of the clock pulse. If the Timing Analyzer cannot guarantee that this constraint is met, the clock signal may not propagate as expected under all operating conditions. This can happen when the delay variation on a clock path becomes too great. This situation does not normally occur, but may arise if clock signals are routed through core logic elements or core routing resources.

In designs that target Intel® Stratix® 10 devices, clock regions can be constrained to a rectangle whose dimensions are defined by the sector grid, as seen in the Clock Sector Region layer of the Chip Planner.

This assignment specifies the bottom left and top right coordinates of the rectangle in the format "SX# SY# SX# SY#". For example, "SX0 SY0 SX1 SY1" constrains the clock to a 2x2 region, from the bottom left of sector (0,0) to the top right of sector (1,1). For a constraint spanning only one sector, it is sufficient to specify the location of that sector, for example "SX1 SY1". The bounding rectangle can also be specified by the bottom left and top right corners in chip coordinates, for example, "X37 Y181 X273 Y324". However, such a constraint should be sector aligned (using sector coordinates guarantees this) or the Fitter automatically snaps to the smallest sector aligned rectangle that still encompasses the original assignment. The "SX# SY# SX# SY#"|"X# Y# X# Y#" strings are case-insensitive.