Intel® Quartus® Prime Standard Edition User Guide: PCB Design Tools

ID 683619
Date 9/24/2018
Public
Document Table of Contents

1.5.1.1. Performing Early Pin-Out SSN Analysis with the SSN Analyzer

In the early stages of your design cycle, you may not have complete board information, such as board trace parameters, layer information, and the signal breakout layers. If you run the SSN Analyzer without this specific information, it uses default board trace models and board layer information for SSN analysis, and as a result the SSN Analyzer confidence level is low. If the noise amounts are larger than the pass criteria for early pin-out SSN analysis, verify whether the SSN noise violations are true failures or false failures. For example, sometimes the SSN Analyzer can determine whether pins are switching synchronously and use that information to filter false positives; however, it may not be able to determine all the synchronous groups. You can improve the SSN analysis results by adjusting your I/O assignments and other design settings. After you optimize your design such that it meets the pass criteria for the early pin-out flow, you can then begin to design your PCB.

If you have complete information for the top-level ports of your design, you can use the SSN Analyzer to perform an initial SSN evaluation. Use the following steps to perform early pin-out SSN analysis:

  1. Create a project in the Intel® Quartus® Prime software.
  2. Specify your top-level design information either in schematic form or in HDL code.
  3. Perform Analysis and Synthesis.
  4. Create I/O assignments, such as I/O standard assignments, for the top-level ports in your design.
    Note: Do not create pin location assignments. The Fitter automatically creates optimized pin location assignments.
  5. If you do not have completed design files and timing constraints, run I/O assignment analysis.
    Note: During I/O assignment analysis, the Fitter places all the unplaced pins on the device, and checks all the I/O placement rules.
  6. Run the SSN Analyzer.