Device Design Guidelines: Agilex™ 5 FPGAs and SoCs

ID 813741
Date 4/01/2024
Public
Document Table of Contents

6.9. Simulation

Table 74.  Simulation Checklist

Number

Done? Checklist Item

1

  Specify your simulation tool, and use the correct supported version and simulation models.

Intel recommends you perform functional simulations from the early stage of your design flow to check the design functionality or logical behavior of each design block. You do not have to fully compile your design to perform a functional simulation; you can generate a functional simulation netlist that does not contain timing information. As mentioned in RTL Simulation, the Quartus® Prime software does not include a native simulator but provides support for specific RTL- and gate-level EDA simulators.

Quartus® Prime Pro Edition software provides the Questa* Intel® FPGA Edition simulator, a version of the Questa* Intel® FPGA Edition Advanced simulator, targeted for Intel FPGA devices. The Questa* Intel® FPGA Edition simulator supports the Intel FPGA gate-level simulation libraries, includes behavioral simulation, HDL test benches, and Tcl scripting support, thus enabling you to take advantage of advanced testbench capabilities and other features. In addition, the Quartus® Prime EDA netlist Writer can generate timing netlist files to support other third-party simulation tools such as Siemens* EDA, QuestaSim* Simulator, Synopsys* VCS* and VCS MX, Cadence*, Xcelium* Parallel Simulator, and Aldec* Riviera-Pro*. Specify your simulation tool in the EDA Tools Settings page of the Settings dialog box to generate the appropriate output simulation netlist.

If you use a third-party simulation tool, use the software version that is supported with your Quartus® Prime software version. The Quartus® Prime Software Release Notes list the version of each simulation tool that is officially supported with that version of the Quartus® Prime software. Use the model libraries provided with your Quartus® Prime software version, because libraries can change between versions, which might cause a mismatch with your simulation netlist. To create a testbench, on the Processing menu, point to Start and click Start Test Bench Template Writer.

For a list of simulation tools supporting the Quartus® Prime Pro Edition software, refer to Quartus® Prime Pro Edition: Version 23.4 Software and Device Support Release Notes.