The Design Partition Planner is a graphical environment where you can view design entities, I/O banks, connectivity, design hierarchy, and partition membership. The following sections describe and illustrate the graphical representations displayed in the Design Partition Planner.

I/O Banks

I/O banks appear as rectangles located on the perimeter of the Design Partition Planner workspace. Shading indicates that pins are in use. The Design Partition Planner allows you to view connectivity between design entities and I/O banks.

Design Entities

Design entities are the fundamental design units depicted in the Design Partition Planner. Entities are displayed as rectangles, with their sizes reflecting their relative resource usage. By default, the Design Partition Planner draws child entities inside the perimeter of their parent. A colored bar at the top of the entity indicates the base color that represents the entity in both the Design Partition Planner and the Chip Planner.

The entity's name appears in the colored bar at the top of the entity. Additional information, including the number of logic cells used by the entity, the percentage of the design represented by the entity, and its number of children, is shown immediately below the colored bar. Shown in gray within each entity is a layer of top-level glue logic, part of which connects the parent entity with its children. The immediate child entities appear at the bottom of the entity. Child entities that contain one or more nodes residing on failing paths are shown in red.

Design Partitions

Design partitions appear as translucent boxes containing all entities that reside in that design partition; the color of each partition matches its color in the Design Partitions window. A control area at the lower right corner of the partition displays the partition name, compilation status, and provides controls for user interaction. Partitions that are uncompiled, or that have changed since the last compilation, are labelled uncompiled immediately above the control area at the bottom of the partition. Partitions that have been imported are labelled imported.
 

Connections and Bundles

To see the relative connectivity between entities, you can extract entities from the top-level entity by dragging them into the surrounding white space, or by right-clicking an entity and clicking Extract from Parent. The Design Partition Planner draws connections automatically between entities; it also bundles connections—that is, it represents any number of physical connections as a single line between entities, with a numeric label indicating the number of connections represented by that bundle.

Bundles that contain one or more failing paths are displayed in red. When a bundle contains one or more failing paths, the numeric label shows both the total number of connections in the bundle and, in parentheses, the number of those connections that have negative slack.
 

 

Note: To see timing-related information, including failing paths, you must first open the TimeQuest Timing Analyzer and perform a timing analysis, and then click Show Timing Data in the Design Partition Planner.

Because some connections have no significant impact on partitioning, the Design Partition Planner allows you to configure how it counts connections, and to include or exclude specific connection types. You can configure the handling of connection bundles in the Bundle Configuration dialog box.

Hierarchical Display

The Design Partition Planner provides three methods of viewing design hierarchy information.

When you select an entity, the hierarchy icon in the top-left corner of each immediate parent, child, and sibling entity automatically changes appearance to show that entity's hierarchical relationship to the selected entity. In each icon, the branch corresponding to the selected entity is highlighted in the same color as the entity itself.

The hierarchical display mode, which you display with the Show Hierarchy Display command, repositions displayed entities into a tree structure, illustrating the design hierarchy. All commands remain fully functional in hierarchical display mode. The Design Partition Planner remains in hierarchical display mode until you switch back to connectivity display mode.

You can also display a temporary, view-only, hierarchy tree by clicking and holding the hierarchy icon in the top-left corner of an entity. When you click and hold an entity's hierarchy icon, the Design Partition Planner repositions displayed entities into a hierarchy tree centered around the entity whose icon you clicked. This method of viewing hierarchy information is intended for quick-reference only, and remains active only while you hold the icon. No commands are available during this method of hierarchy display.

The Design Partition Planner displays the logical layout of a design and the Chip Planner shows the physical layout. You can have both the Design Partition Planner and the Chip Planner displayed simultaneously, so that you can evaluate both logical and physical layouts and make effective partitioning choices.

You can select the Design Partition Planner task in the Chip Planner to display the physical placement of design entities with the same colors as the corresponding entity representations in the Design Partition Planner.

You can use the Design Partition Planner in an iterative process to explore and refine a design's partitioning scheme. By viewing timing information and the relative densities of connectivity between design entities in the Design Partition Planner and relating those factors to the physical placement of entities as displayed in the Chip Planner, you can make partitioning choices that achieve timing closure more efficiently. Also, by subdividing larger partitions into smaller logical partitions, you can reduce compilation time.

When you initially open a design in the Design Partition Planner, you see only the top-level design partition containing the top-level design entity.

You can extract entities from the top-level entity by dragging them into the surrounding white space, or by right-clicking an entity and clicking Extract from Parent. Extracting an entity allows you to see the relative connectivity and timing between each of the component entities.

You can continue extracting entities from the top-level entity to view more connectivity details. When you isolate an entity that is suited to becoming its own partition, you can use the Create Design Partition command to create a new partition for that entity.

Auto-Partitioning

You can use the Auto-Partition command to create an initial design partitioning scheme. This feature evaluates a compiled design and creates partitions based on an analysis of the design hierarchy; any existing partitions are unaffected by this command. The quality of the partitioning scheme produced by this command is heavily design-dependant, but may help achieve an optimal partitioning scheme.