Intel® Quartus® Prime Standard Edition User Guide: Third-party Synthesis

ID 683796
Date 9/24/2018
Public
Document Table of Contents

2.10. Incremental Compilation and Block-Based Design

As designs become more complex and designers work in teams, a block‑based incremental design flow is often an effective design approach. In an incremental compilation flow, you can make changes to one part of the design while maintaining the placement and performance of unchanged parts of the design. Design iterations can be made dramatically faster by focusing new compilations on particular design partitions and merging results with the results of previous compilations of other partitions. You can perform optimization on individual blocks and then integrate them into a final design and optimize the design at the top-level.

The first step in an incremental design flow is to make sure that different parts of your design do not affect each other. You must ensure that you have separate netlists for each partition in your design. If the whole design is in one netlist file, changes in one partition affect other partitions because of possible node name changes when you resynthesize the design.

You can create different implementations for each partition in your Precision Synthesis project, which allows you to switch between partitions without leaving the current project file. You can also create a separate project for each partition if you require separate projects for a team-based design flow. Alternatively, you can use the incremental synthesis capability in the Precision RTL Plus software.