Block-Based Design Flows

Overview

The Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition Software offers block-based design flows. There are two types—the Incremental Block-Based Compilation and Design Block Reuse flows, which allow your geographically diverse development team to collaborate on a design.

Faster Timing Closure with Incremental Block-Based Compilation Flow

Team members can architect the design into segments, then individually develop and achieve timing closure on each partition of the design. Bringing the global design together is simple since each block maintains its placement and timing.

With these features, you can preserve, empty, or export the contents of a partition. A partition that has been preserved, emptied, or exported is called a design block. Using design blocks introduces the concepts of Block-Based Compilation and Design Block Reuse.

Incremental Block-Based Compilation is preserving or emptying a partition within a project. This works with core partitions and requires no additional files or floor planning. The partition can be emptied, preserved at Source, Synthesis, and Final snapshots.

Easier Collaboration with Design Block Reuse Flow

The Design Block Reuse flow enables you to reuse a block of a design, in a different project, by creating, preserving, and exporting a partition. With this feature, you can expect a clean hand off of timing-closed modules between different teams. It also gives you the flexibility of placing timing-closed blocks, pre-built components or even 3rd party intellectual property (IP).

Two types of block reuse are supported in this flow—core logic partition and periphery partition. The Periphery Reuse flow allows you to reuse a placed and routed periphery (including I/O, HSSIO, PCIe*, phase-locked loops (PLLs), as well as core resources) and leave an empty (flexible) development area open for other designers. The empty area is defined by a special type of partition that creates a hole in the periphery. This hole can be developed later by another team.

Block-based design flows.