Intel® Quartus® Prime Standard Edition User Guide: Design Compilation

ID 683283
Date 9/24/2018
Public
Document Table of Contents

1.7.5.3. Advanced Importing Options

You can use advanced options in the Import Design Partition dialog box to integrate a partition developed in a separate Intel® Quartus® Prime project into the top-level design. The import process adds more control than using the .qxp as a source file, and is useful only in the following circumstances:
  • If you want LogicLock regions in your top-level design (.qsf)—If you have regions in your partitions that are not also in the top-level design, the regions will be added to your .qsf during the import process.
  • If you want different settings or placement for different instantiations of the same entity—You can control the setting import process with the advanced import options, and specify different settings for different instances of the same .qxp design block.

When you use the Import Design Partition dialog box to integrate a partition into the top-level design, the import process sets the partition’s netlist type to Imported in the Design Partitions window.

After you compile the entire design, if you make changes to the place-and-route results (such as movement of an imported LogicLock region), use the Post-Fit netlist type on subsequent compilations. To discard an imported netlist and recompile from source code, you can compile the partition with the netlist type set to Source File and be sure to include the relevant source code in the top‑level design. The import process sets the partition’s Fitter Preservation Level to the setting with the highest degree of preservation supported by the imported netlist. For example, if a post-fit netlist is imported with placement information, the Fitter Preservation Level is set to Placement, but you can change it to the Netlist Only value.

When you import a partition from a .qxp, the .qxp itself is not part of the top‑level design because the netlists from the file have been imported into the project database. Therefore if a new version of a .qxp is exported, the top-level designer must perform another import of the .qxp.

When you import a partition into a top-level design with the Import Design Partition dialog box, the software imports relevant assignments from the partition into the top‑level design. If required, you can change the way some assignments are imported, as described in the following subsections.