Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition User Guide: Scripting

ID 683432
Date 9/26/2022
Public

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3.4. Tcl Design Flow Controls

You can use Tcl scripts to control all aspects of the design flow, including controlling other software, when the other software also includes a scripting interface.

Typically, EDA tools include their own script interpreters that extend core language functionality with tool-specific commands. For example, the Intel® Quartus® Prime Tcl interpreter supports all core Tcl commands, and adds numerous commands specific to the Intel® Quartus® Prime software. You can include commands in one Tcl script to run another script, which allows you to combine or chain together scripts to control different tools. Because scripts for different tools must be executed with different Tcl interpreters, it is difficult to pass information between the scripts unless one script writes information into a file and another script reads it.

Within the Intel® Quartus® Prime software, you can perform many different operations in a design flow (such as synthesis, fitting, and timing analysis) from a single script, making it easy to maintain global state information and pass data between the operations. However, there are some limitations on the operations you can perform in a single script due to the various packages supported by each executable.

There are no limitations on running flows from any executable. Flows include operations found in

Processing > Start in the Intel® Quartus® Prime GUI, and are also documented as options for the execute_flow Tcl command. If you can make settings in the Intel® Quartus® Prime software and run a flow to get your desired result, you can make the same settings and run the same flow in a Tcl script.