Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition User Guide: Power Analysis and Optimization
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3.3.4. Gate-Level Register Retiming
The Perform gate-level register retiming option in the Intel® Quartus® Prime software enables the movement of registers across combinational logic to balance timing, allowing the software to trade off the delay between critical and noncritical paths.
Retiming uses fewer registers than pipelining. In this example of gate-level register retiming, the 10 ns critical delay is reduced by moving the register relative to the combinational logic, resulting in the reduction of data depth and switching activity.
Gate-level register retiming makes changes at the gate level. If you are using an atom netlist from a third-party synthesis tool, you must also select the Perform WYSIWYG primitive resynthesis option to undo the atom primitives to gates mapping (so that register retiming can be performed), and then to remap gates to Intel primitives.