Design Partition Planner Interface

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.

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.