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

ID 683323
Date 9/24/2018
Public
Document Table of Contents

1.3.1. Validating Against Design Rules

You can run the Design Assistant following design synthesis or compilation. The Design Assistant performs a post-fit netlist analysis of your design.

The default is to apply all the rules to your project. If there are some rules that are unimportant to your design, you can turn off the rules that you do not want the Design Assistant to use.

Figure 9.  Intel® Quartus® Prime Design Flow with the Design Assistant
  1. Database of the default rules for the Design Assistant.
  2. A file that contains the .xml codes of the custom rules for the Design Assistant. For more details about how to create this file .

    The Design Assistant analyzes your design netlist at different stages of the compilation flow and may yield different warnings or errors, even though the netlists are functionally the same. Your pre-synthesis, post-synthesis, and post-fitting netlists might be different due to optimizations performed by the Intel® Quartus® Prime software. For example, a warning message in a pre-synthesis netlist may be removed after the netlist has been synthesized into a post-synthesis or post-fitting netlist.

    The exact operation of the Design Assistant depends on when you run it:

  • When you run the Design Assistant after running a full compilation or fitting, the Design Assistant performs a post-fitting analysis on the design.
  • When you run the Design Assistant after performing Analysis and Synthesis, the Design Assistant performs post-synthesis analysis on the design.
  • When you start the Design Assistant after performing Analysis and Elaboration, the Design Assistant performs a pre-synthesis analysis on the design. You can also perform pre-synthesis analysis with the Design Assistant using the command-line. You can use the -rtl option with the quartus_drc executable, as shown in the following example:

    quartus_drc <project_name> --rtl=on

    If your design violates a design rule, the Design Assistant generates warning messages and information messages about the violated rule. The Design Assistant displays these messages in the Messages window, in the Design Assistant Messages report, and in the Design Assistant report files. You can find the Design Assistant report files called <project_name> .drc.rpt in the <project_name> subdirectory of the project directory.