Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition User Guide: Platform Designer

ID 683609
Date 12/12/2022
Public

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2.5.3. Generating Board and Preset Files for Existing Systems

You can generate and apply board and preset files to an existing system design that did not originally include board or preset files. This technique allows you to quickly specify appropriate configuration options when you are targeting the same board and IP as the board and preset files. You can apply the board and preset files to the existing system using either the command-line or in Platform Designer.

Generating Board and Presets for Existing Systems Using Platform Designer

To apply board and preset files to an existing Platform Designer system using the Platform Designer GUI, you first load the pin assignments from the Intel® Quartus® Prime Settings File (.qsf). You then define a new board file that overwrites any existing board file and IP presets. You must ensure that both Enable Board Generation and Enable System Preset Generation options are on when defining the new board. For details on creating IP presets, refer to Creating IP Presets Targeting Specific Boards.

To apply board and preset files to an existing system using Platform Designer, follow these steps:

  1. In the Intel® Quartus® Prime software, open and compile the project that contains the target Platform Designer system for board and preset files. In this step the Fitter generates pin assignments.
  2. In Platform Designer, open the target system for application of board and preset files.
  3. Click File > Load Pin from Quartus Project. The pin assignments from the current Intel® Quartus® Prime project load into the Platform Designer system.
    Note: You must match the Platform Designer system signal names with the top-level project signals for the pin info to be recognized and loaded. Not matching these signals can cause failure to load the pin information.
  4. Confirm the loaded pin assignments in the Exported Interface tab, as Editing Pin Assignments for Presets describes.
  5. Define a new board and presets by clicking New in the Platform Designer Board Catalog. The Create New Board dialog box opens.
    Figure 14. Create New Board Dialog Box


  6. Specify options for the new board file, as Creating a New Board File describes. When specifying options, turn on the Enable Board Generation and Enable System Preset Generation to overwrite any existing board or preset files for the system.
  7. Click Save to generate the new board and preset files.
  8. View the new system presets in the Board tab.
    Figure 15. System Presets in Board Tab

Generating Board and Presets for Existing Systems Using Command Line

The command line method of applying board and presets to existing systems implements the same steps in a script that you can perform in the Platform Designer GUI. To apply board and preset files to an existing Platform Designer system using the command line, you must first create a Tcl script that performs the following:

  1. Loads the correct Platform Designer package version number with package require.
  2. Imports the pin assignments from the corresponding Intel® Quartus® Prime Setting file (.qsf) with load_pin_from_quartus_project.
  3. Saves the system to apply the pin assignment to the system with save_system.
  4. Exports the system or IP presets and board file with export_system_preset.

The following shows an example script that implements these steps:

package require -exact qsys <version number> 
load_pin_from_quartus_project 
save_system
export_system_preset test_preset.qprs 
export_board_file "<board name>" <filename_board.xml>

The following command runs the example script:

$ qsys-script --script=export.tcl --quartus-project=[test_project] \
     --system-file=[test_system.qsys]