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

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

2.8.2. Why Create a Floorplan?

Creating a design floorplan is usually required if you want to preserve placement for partitions that will be exported, to avoid resource conflicts between partitions in the top-level design. Floorplan location planning can be important for a design that uses incremental compilation, for the following reasons:
  • To avoid resource conflicts between partitions, predominantly when integrating partitions exported from another Intel® Quartus® Prime project.
  • To ensure good quality of results when recompiling individual timing-critical partitions.

Location assignments for each partition ensure that there are no placement conflicts between partitions. If there are no LogicLock region assignments, or if LogicLock regions are set to auto-size or floating location, no device resources are specifically allocated for the logic associated with the region. If you do not clearly define resource allocation, logic placement can conflict when you integrate the partitions in the top-level design if you reuse the placement information from the exported netlist.

Creating a floorplan is also recommended for timing-critical partitions that have little timing margin to maintain good quality of results when the design changes.

Floorplan assignments are not required for non-critical partitions compiled in the same Intel® Quartus® Prime project. The logic for partitions that are not timing-critical can be placed anywhere in the device on each recompilation if that is best for your design.

Design floorplan assignments prevent the situation in which the Fitter must place a partition in an area of the device where most resources are used by other partitions. A LogicLock region provides a reasonable region to re-place logic after a change, so the Fitter does not have to scatter logic throughout the available space in the device.

The figure illustrates the problems that may be associated with refitting designs that do not have floorplan location assignments. The left floorplan shows the initial placement of a four-partition design (P1-P4) without any floorplan location assignments. The right floorplan shows the device if a change occurs to P3. After removing the logic for the changed partition, the Fitter must re-place and reroute the new logic for P3 in the scattered white space. The placement of the post-fit netlists for other partitions forces the Fitter to implement P3 with the device resources that have not been used.

Figure 30. Representation of Device Floorplan without Location Assignments

The Fitter has a more difficult task because of more difficult physical constraints, and as a result, compilation time often increases. The Fitter might not be able to find any legal placement for the logic in partition P3, even if it could in the initial compilation. Additionally, if the Fitter can find a legal placement, the quality of results often decreases in these cases, sometimes dramatically, because the new partition is now scattered throughout the device.

The figure below shows the initial placement of a four-partition design with floorplan location assignments. Each partition is assigned to a LogicLock region. The second part of the figure shows the device after partition P3 is removed. This placement presents a much more reasonable task to the Fitter and yields better results.

Figure 31. Representation of Device Floorplan with Location Assignments

Altera recommends that you create a LogicLock floorplan assignment for timing-critical blocks with little timing margin that will be recompiled as you make changes to the design.