Understanding Priority of Wildcard Logic Lock Region Membership Assignments

You can create conflicting membership assignments between Logic Lock regions with wildcard assignments. To avoid this, the Intel® Quartus® Prime software prioritizes assignments as follows:

  • Highest priority— node assignments
  • Second priority— wildcard assignments
  • Lowest priority— entity assignments

These rules of precedence are applied in a manner analogous to the rules of algebra. Just as the rules of algebra specify that multiplication operations are performed before addition operations, these rules specify that node assignments be applied before wildcard or entity assignments. Similarly, wildcard assignments are applied before entity assignments.

The following example illustrates how priorities are determined. Consider a project with the following compilation hierarchy:



Assume the following node, wildcard, and entity assignments:

Assignment

Logic Lock region

Top Level

Region_1

*B*

Region_2

Top|B:inst2|C

Region_3

The above assignments result in the regions being populated as follows:

Region_1

Region_2

Region_3

TopLevel|A:inst1|D

Top Level|B:inst2

TopLevel|B:inst2|C

TopLevel|E:inst3

TopLevel|A:inst1|Bob