Intel® Quartus® Prime Standard Edition User Guide: Third-party Synthesis

ID 683796
Date 9/24/2018
Public
Document Table of Contents

1.11. Incremental Compilation and Block-Based Design

As designs become more complex and designers work in teams, a block‑based incremental design flow is often an effective design approach. In an incremental compilation flow, you can make changes to part of the design while maintaining the placement and performance of unchanged parts of the design. Design iterations are made dramatically faster by focusing new compilations on particular design partitions and merging results with previous compilation results of other partitions. You can perform optimization on individual subblocks and then preserve the results before you integrate the blocks into a final design and optimize it at the top-level.

MultiPoint synthesis, which is available for certain device technologies in the Synplify Pro and Premier software, provides an automated block-based incremental synthesis flow. The MultiPoint feature manages a design hierarchy to let you design incrementally and synthesize designs that take too long for synthesis of the entire project. MultiPoint synthesis allows different netlist files to be created for different sections of a design hierarchy and supports the Intel® Quartus® Prime incremental compilation methodology. This feature also ensures that only those sections of a design that have been updated are resynthesized when the design is compiled, reducing synthesis run time and preserving the results for the unchanged blocks. You can change and resynthesize one section of a design without affecting other sections.

You can also partition your design and create different netlist files manually with the Synplify software by creating a separate project for the logic in each partition of the design. Creating different netlist files for each partition of the design also means that each partition can be independent of the others.

Hierarchical design methodologies can improve the efficiency of your design process, providing better design reuse opportunities and fewer integration problems when working in a team environment. When you use these incremental synthesis methodologies, you can take advantage of incremental compilation in the Intel® Quartus® Prime software. You can perform placement and routing on only the changed partitions of the design, which reduces place-and-route time and preserves your fitting results.