Intel® Cyclone® 10 GX Device Design Guidelines

ID 683703
Date 11/06/2017
Public
Document Table of Contents

Area and Timing Optimization

Table 62.  Area and Timing Optimization Checklist
Number Done? Checklist Item
1   Perform Early Timing Estimation if you want timing estimates before running a full compilation.
2   Use Intel® Quartus® Prime optimization features to achieve timing closure or improve the resource utilization.
3   Use the Timing and Area Optimization Advisors to suggest optimization settings.

This section highlights some of the features offered in the Intel® Quartus® Prime software to help optimize area (or resource utilization) and timing performance. If the timing analysis reports that your design requirements were not met, you must make changes to your design or settings and recompile the design to achieve timing closure. If your compilation results in no-fit messages, you must make changes to get successful placement and routing.

You can use the Early Timing Estimation feature to estimate your design’s timing results before the software performs full placement and routing. On the Processing menu, point to Start and click Start Early Timing Estimate to generate initial compilation results after you have run analysis and synthesis.

Physical synthesis optimizations make placement-specific changes to the netlist that improve results for a specific Intel device. You can optimize for performance and fitting in the Physical Synthesis Optimizations page of the Settings dialog box. The options in the Physical Synthesis Optimizations page typically increase compilation time significantly but can provide significant improvements to the quality of results with push-button optimizations. If you turn on these options, ensure that they do improve the results for your design. If you do not require these options to meet your design timing requirements, turn off the options to reduce the compilation time.

The Design Space Explorer (DSE) is a utility that automates the process of finding the optimal collection of the Intel® Quartus® Prime software settings for your design. The Search for Best Performance and Search for Best Area options under Exploration Settings use a predefined exploration space to target design performance or area improvements with multiple compilations. You can also set the Optimization Goal to Optimize for Speed or Optimize for Area using the Advanced tab in the DSE window.

The Optimization Advisors provide guidance in making settings that optimize your design. On the Tools menu, point to Advisors and click Resource Optimization Advisor or Timing Optimization Advisor. Evaluate the options and choose the settings that best suit your requirements.