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

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

4.2.3. Using Incremental Compilation

The incremental compilation feature can accelerate design iteration time by up to 70% for small design changes, and helps you reach design timing closure more efficiently.

You can speed up design iterations by recompiling only a particular design partition and merging results with previous compilation results from other partitions. You can also use physical synthesis optimization techniques for specific design partitions while leaving other parts of your design untouched to preserve performance.

If you are using a third-party synthesis tool, you can create separate atom netlist files for the parts of your design that you already have synthesized and optimized so that you update only the parts of your design that change.

In the standard incremental compilation design flow, you can divide the top-level design into partitions, which the software can compile and optimize in the top-level Intel® Quartus® Prime project. You can preserve fitting results and performance for completed partitions while other parts of your design are changing. Incremental compilation reduces the compilation time for each design iteration because the software does not recompile the unchanged partitions in your design.

The incremental compilation feature facilitates team-based design flows by enabling designers to create and optimize design blocks independently, when necessary, and supports third-party IP integration.