Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition User Guide: Design Recommendations

ID 683082
Date 3/28/2022
Public

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3. Managing Metastability with the Intel® Quartus® Prime Software

You can use the Intel® Quartus® Prime software to analyze the average mean time between failures (MTBF) due to metastability caused by synchronization of asynchronous signals, and optimize the design to improve the metastability MTBF.

All registers in digital devices, such as FPGAs, have defined signal-timing requirements that allow each register to correctly capture data at its input ports and produce an output signal. To ensure reliable operation, the input to a register must be stable for a minimum amount of time before the clock edge (register setup time or tSU) and a minimum amount of time after the clock edge (register hold time or tH). The register output is available after a specified clock-to-output delay (tCO).

If the data violates the setup or hold time requirements, the output of the register might go into a metastable state. In a metastable state, the voltage at the register output hovers at a value between the high and low states, which means the output transition to a defined high or low state is delayed beyond the specified tCO. Different destination registers might capture different values for the metastable signal, which can cause the system to fail.

In synchronous systems, the input signals must always meet the register timing requirements, so that metastability does not occur. Metastability problems commonly occur when a signal is transferred between circuitry in unrelated or asynchronous clock domains, because the signal can arrive at any time relative to the destination clock.

The MTBF due to metastability is an estimate of the average time between instances when metastability could cause a design failure. A high MTBF (such as hundreds or thousands of years between metastability failures) indicates a more robust design. You should determine an acceptable target MTBF in the context of your entire system and taking in account that MTBF calculations are statistical estimates.

The metastability MTBF for a specific signal transfer, or all the transfers in a design, can be calculated using information about the design and the device characteristics. Improving the metastability MTBF for your design reduces the chance that signal transfers could cause metastability problems in your device.

The Intel® Quartus® Prime software provides analysis, optimization, and reporting features to help manage metastability in Intel designs. These metastability features are supported only for designs constrained with the Intel® Quartus® Prime Timing Analyzer. Both typical and worst-case MBTF values are generated for select device families.