AN 847: Signal Tap Tutorial with Design Block Reuse: for Intel® Arria® 10 FPGA Development Board

ID 683712
Date 12/21/2020
Public
Document Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Updated for:
Intel® Quartus® Prime Design Suite 20.3
The Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition software supports verification of block-based design flows with the Signal Tap logic analyzer. This tutorial demonstrates how to incorporate internal signal verification into design block reuse flows in the Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition software.

A design block is the logic comprising a hierarchical design instance. Block-based design flows enable preservation of blocks within a project via Incremental Block-Based Compilation, as well as reuse of design blocks in other projects via Design Block Reuse. To preserve or reuse a design block, you must designate the block as a design partition.

Figure 1. Core Partition Reuse Example

Verifying a block-based design requires planning to ensure visibility of logic inside partitions and communication with the Signal Tap logic analyzer. The preparation steps depend on whether you are reusing a core partition or a root partition.

For basic information about designing with reusable blocks, refer to the Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition User Guide: Block-Based Design . For step-by-step instructions on reusing design blocks, refer to AN 839: Design Block Reuse Tutorial for Intel® Arria® 10 FPGA Development Board .

This tutorial uses a provided design example to walk through the steps required to perform Signal Tap debugging in reused design blocks.