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

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

2.10.5. Hierarchy and Design Considerations

To ensure the proper functioning of the synthesis flow, you can create separate partitions only for modules, entities, or existing netlist files. In addition, each module or entity must have its own design file. If two different modules are in the same design file, but are defined as being part of different partitions, incremental synthesis cannot be maintained because both regions must be recompiled when you change one of the modules.

Intel recommends that you register all inputs and outputs of each partition. This makes logic synchronous and avoids any delay penalty on signals that cross partition boundaries.

If you use boundary tri-states in a lower‑level block, the Precision Synthesis software pushes the tri-states through the hierarchy to the top-level to make use of the tri-state drivers on output pins of Intel devices. Because pushing tri-states requires optimizing through hierarchies, lower‑level tri-states are not supported with a block‑based compilation methodology. You should use tri-state drivers only at the external output pins of the device and in the top-level block in the hierarchy.