Quartus® Prime Pro Edition User Guide: Design Recommendations

ID 683082
Date 9/30/2024
Public
Document Table of Contents

1.6.4.4. VHDL State Machines

To ensure proper recognition and inference of VHDL state machines, represent the different states with enumerated types, and use the corresponding types to make state assignments.

This implementation makes the state machine easier to read, and reduces the risk of errors during coding. If your RTL does not represent states with an enumerated type, Quartus® Prime synthesis (and other synthesis tools) do not recognize the state machine. Instead, synthesis implements the state machine as regular logic gates and registers. Consequently, and the state machine does not appear in the state machine list of the Quartus® Prime Compilation Report, Analysis & Synthesis section. Moreover, Quartus® Prime synthesis does not perform any of the optimizations that are specific to state machines.