Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition User Guide: Debug Tools

ID 683819
Date 12/04/2023
Public

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2.8. Preserving Signals for Debugging

The Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition software allows you to mark and preserve specific signals through the compilation process, which enables visibility of any node within the available system debugging tools.

To ensure that specific nodes in your RTL are available for debugging after the Compiler's synthesis and place-and-route stages, you can apply the preserve_for_debug attribute to the signals of interest in your RTL, and also apply the Enable preserve for debug assignments project-level .qsf assignment.

This section refers to the following terms to explain use of the preserve for debug feature:

Table 4.  Debug Signal Preservation Terminology
Term Description
node

A signal name present in your design RTL and possibly in the compilation netlist for the current project. Typically, the node name refers to the output of a logical unit, such as gate, register, LUT, embedded memory, DSP, or others.

The Intel® Quartus® Prime GUI can display this node name in various locations, such as the Node Finder, when debugging the signals in your design. You can search for this node name to apply constraints and use in debugging operations.

hpath The Intel® Quartus® Prime-style hierarchical path, with instance names separated by "|", for example:foo|boo|node