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

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

1.5.4.3. Incremental Compilation Advisor

You can use the Incremental Compilation Advisor to check that your design follows Altera’s recommendations for creating design partitions and floorplan location assignments.

Recommendations are split into General Recommendations, Timing Recommendations, and Team-Based Design Recommendations that apply to design flows in which partitions are compiled independently in separate Intel® Quartus® Prime projects before being integrated into the top-level design. Each recommendation provides an explanation, describes the effect of the recommendation, and provides the action required to make a suggested change. In some cases, there is a link to the appropriate Intel® Quartus® Prime settings page where you can make a suggested change to assignments or settings. For some items, if your design does not follow the recommendation, the Check Recommendations operation creates a table that lists any nodes or paths in your design that could be improved. The relevant timing-independent recommendations for the design are also listed in the Design Partitions window and the LogicLock Regions window.

To verify that your design follows the recommendations, go to the Timing Independent Recommendations page or the Timing Dependent Recommendations page, and then click Check Recommendations. For large designs, these operations can take a few minutes.

After you perform a check operation, symbols appear next to each recommendation to indicate whether the design or project setting follows the recommendations, or if some or all of the design or project settings do not follow the recommendations. Following these recommendations is not mandatory to use the incremental compilation feature. The recommendations are most important to ensure good results for timing-critical partitions.

For some items in the Advisor, if your design does not follow the recommendation, the Check Recommendations operation lists any parts of the design that could be improved. For example, if not all of the partition I/O ports follow the Register All Non-Global Ports recommendation, the advisor displays a list of unregistered ports with the partition name and the node name associated with the port.

When the advisor provides a list of nodes, you can right-click a node, and then click Locate to cross-probe to other Intel® Quartus® Prime features, such as the RTL Viewer, Chip Planner, or the design source code in the text editor.

Note: Opening a new Timing Analyzer report resets the Incremental Compilation Advisor results, so you must rerun the Check Recommendations process.