Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition User Guide: Debug Tools

ID 683819
Date 10/13/2021
Public

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Document Table of Contents

7.3.1.2. Autosweep View

The Autosweep view allows you to sweep over IP parameters to find the best combination and define your own quality metrics for a given Autosweep run.

The System Console Autosweep view allows you to define your own quality metrics for a given Autosweep run.

Figure 113. Autosweep View of the System Console

By default, the Autosweep view launches without any connection to a toolkit instance(s) or channel pair(s). You can add parameters by clicking Add Parameter and selecting parameters from specific toolkit instance(s) in the Select Parameter dialog box. You can remove parameters by selecting them and clicking Remove Parameter. Alternatively, you can add your own parameters and create as many Autosweep views as you want, to allow sweeping over different parameters on different channels of the same instance, or different instances entirely.

To save a parameter set for future use, select the parameter set, and then click Export Settings. To load a collection, click Import Settings.

Important: Any channel of a particular instance that has parameters currently being swept over in one Autosweep view cannot have other (or the same) parameters swept over in a different Autosweep view. For example, if one Autosweep view is currently sweeping over parameters from InstA | Channel 0, and another Autosweep view has parameters from InstA | Channel 0, an error is displayed if you attempt to start the second sweep before the first has completed. This prevents you from changing more things than are expected from a given run of autosweep.

Consider the following example complex system with parameters spread across multiple devices:

Figure 114. An Example of the Autosweep System

The Autosweep view allows you to sweep such a complex system when the multiple devices are visible to System Console. You can select the quality metrics from instances different from those you sweep. You can even span levels of the hardware stack from the PMA-level up to protocol-level signaling.

Results

The Results table is populated with one row per autosweep iteration. For every output quality metric added in the Output Metrics section, a column for that metric is added to the Results table, with new row entries added to the bottom. This format allows sorting of the results by quality metric of the system under test, across many combinations of parameters, to determine which parameter settings achieve best real-world results.

The Results table allows visualizing or copying the parameter settings associated with a given case, and sorting by quality metrics. Sort the rows of the table by clicking on the column headers.

Control

The Control pane of the Autosweep view allows starting an autosweep run, once you define at least one input parameter and one quality metric. Starting a run, allowing all combinations to complete, and then pressing the Start button re-runs the same test case. Pressing the Stop button cancels a currently running autosweep.