Quartus® Prime Standard Edition User Guide: Design Compilation

ID 683283
Date 10/22/2021
Public
Document Table of Contents

1.8.4.1. Preparing Your Top-level Design

As the project lead in this scenario, perform the following steps to prepare the top‑level design:
  1. Create a new Quartus® Prime project to ultimately contain the full implementation of the entire design and include a “skeleton” or framework of the design that defines the hierarchy for the subdesigns implemented by separate designers. The top-level design implements the top-level entity in the design and instantiates wrapper files that represent each subdesign by defining only the port interfaces but not the implementation.
  2. Make project-wide settings. Select the device, make global assignments such as device I/O ports, define the top-level timing constraints, and make any global signal constraints to specify which signals can use global routing resources.
  3. Make design partition assignments for each subdesign and set the netlist type for each design partition to be imported to Empty in the Design Partitions window.
  4. Create LogicLock regions. This floorplan should consider the connectivity between partitions and estimates of the size of each partition based on any initial implementation numbers and knowledge of the design specifications.
  5. Provide the constraints from the top-level design to partition designers using one of the following procedures.
    • Use design partition scripts to pass constraints and generate separate Quartus® Prime projects. On the Project menu, use the Generate Design Partition Scripts command, or run the script generator from a Tcl or command prompt. Make changes to the default script options as required for your project. Altera recommends that you pass all the default constraints, including LogicLock regions, for all partitions and virtual pin location assignments. If partitions have not already been created by the other designers, use the partition script to set up the projects so that you can easily take advantage of makefiles. Provide each partition designer with the Tcl file to create their project with the appropriate constraints. If you are using makefiles, provide the makefile for each partition.
    • Use documentation or manually-created scripts to pass all constraints and assignments to each partition designer.