Quartus® Prime Standard Edition User Guide: Design Compilation

ID 683283
Date 10/22/2021
Public
Document Table of Contents

1.7.3. Exporting Partitions

When partition designers achieve the design requirements in their separate Quartus® Prime projects, each designer can export their design as a partition so it can be integrated into the top‑level design by the project lead. The Export Design Partition dialog box, available from the Project menu, allows designers to export a design partition to a Quartus® Prime Exported Partition File (.qxp) with a post-synthesis netlist, a post-fit netlist, or both. The project lead then adds the .qxp to the top-level design to integrate the partition.

A designer developing a timing-critical partition or who wants to optimize their partition on their own would opt to export their completed partition with a post-fit netlist, allowing for the partition to more reliably meet timing requirements after integration. In this case, you must ensure that resources are allocated appropriately to avoid conflicts. If the placement and routing optimization can be performed in the top-level design, exporting a post-synthesis netlist allows the most flexibility in the top-level design and avoids potential placement or routing conflicts with other partitions.

When designing the partition logic to be exported into another project, you can add logic around the design block to be exported as a design partition. You can instantiate additional design components for the Quartus® Prime project so that it matches the top-level design environment, especially in cases where you do not have access to the full top-level design project. For example, you can include a top-level PLL in the project, outside of the partition to be exported, so that you can optimize the design with information about the frequency multipliers, phase shifts, compensation delays, and any other PLL parameters. The software then captures timing and resource requirements more accurately while ensuring that the timing analysis in the partition is complete and accurate. You can export the partition for the top-level design without any auxiliary components that are instantiated outside the partition being exported.

If your design team uses makefiles and design partition scripts, the project lead can use the make command with the master_makefile command created by the scripts to export the partitions and create .qxp files. When a partition has been compiled and is ready to be integrated into the top-level design, you can export the partition with option on the Export Design Partition dialog box, available from the Project menu.