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

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

3.9.3. Creating Design Partitions for Incremental Compilation

To create a partition, use the command shown in this example:

set_instance_assignment -name PARTITION_HIERARCHY \
<file name> -to <destination> -section_id <partition name>

The <file name> variable is the name used for internally generated netlist files during incremental compilation. If you create the partition in the Intel® Quartus® Prime software, netlist files are named automatically by the Intel® Quartus® Prime software based on the instance name. If you use Tcl to create your partitions, you must assign a custom file name that is unique across all partitions. For the top-level partition, the specified file name is ignored, and you can use any dummy value. To ensure the names are safe and platform independent, file names should be unique, regardless of case. For example, if a partition uses the file name my_file, no other partition can use the file name MY_FILE. To make file naming simple, Altera recommends that you base each file name on the corresponding instance name for the partition.

The <destination> is the short hierarchy path of the entity. A short hierarchy path is the full hierarchy path without the top-level name, for example: "ram:ram_unit|altsyncram:altsyncram_component" (with quotation marks). For the top-level partition, you can use the pipe (|) symbol to represent the top-level entity.

The <partition name> is the partition name you designate, which should be unique and less than 1024 characters long. The name may only consist of alphanumeric characters, as well as pipe ( | ), colon ( : ), and underscore ( _ ) characters. Altera recommends enclosing the name in double quotation marks (" ").