When you change the target device of the 40- and 100-Gbps Ethernet MAC and PHY Intel® FPGA IP design example, you must remove all the location assignments when prompted. However, you will still encounter fitter errors for illegal pin assignments. An example error message is as follows:
Error (171016): Can't place node "cfp_mod_lopwr" -- illegal location assignment PIN_AW37.
This error message occurs because the design example constraints are split into two Quartus® II Settings File (.qsf) files. The first .qsf file is the main project .qsf file (<variation>_example/example_design/<match>_top_sv/<match>_top_sv.qsf). In this .qsf file you will see a reference to the second .qsf file (<variation>_example/example_design/common/common_settings_sv.qsf) as follows:
source ../common/common_settings_sv.qsf
This second .qsf contains all the location constraints specific to the design example development board.
Remove all location constraints in the file <variation>_example/example_design/common/common_settings_sv.qsf and recompile your design.