Intel® Quartus® Prime Standard Edition User Guide: PCB Design Tools

ID 683619
Date 9/24/2018
Public
Document Table of Contents

3.2.6. Generating Schematic Symbols in I/O Designer

Circuit board schematic creation is one of the first tasks required in the design of a new PCB. You can use the I/O Designer software to generate schematic symbols for your Intel® Quartus® Prime FPGA design for use in the DXDesigner schematic entry tools. The I/O Designer software can generate symbols for use in various Mentor Graphics* schematic entry tools, and can import changes back-annotated by board layout tools to update the database and update the Intel® Quartus® Prime software with the .fx

Most FPGA devices contain hundreds of pins, requiring large schematic symbols that may not fit on a single schematic page. Symbol designs in the I/O Designer software can be split or fractured into various functional blocks, allowing multiple part fractures on the same schematic page or across multiple pages. In the DxDesigner software, these part fractures join together with the use of the HETERO attribute.

You can use the I/O Designer Symbol wizard to quickly create symbols that you can subsequently refine. Alternatively, you can import symbols from another DXDesigner project, and then assign an FPGA to the symbol. To import symbols in the I/O Designer software, File > Import Symbol.

I/O Designer symbols are either functional, physical (PCB), or both. Signals imported into the database, usually from Verilog HDL or VHDL files, are the basis of a functional symbol. No physical device pins must be associated with the signals to generate a functional symbol. This section focuses on board-level PCB symbols with signals directly mapped to physical device pins through assignments in either the Intel® Quartus® Prime Pin Planner or in the I/O Designer database.