Altera's Quartus II "smart compilation" feature killed my de

[enq_semi]

Hi, there,

I have a design contains 12K logic cells and 300K bit memories and
runs at 5MHz. I compiled it for an EP20K1500 device and it worked
(tested on FPGA).

Then I wanted to switch 8 output bits from pin location AF1, AF2, AF3,
AF4, G4, G5, G6 and H2 to DAC0 pins (AE1, AD1 -- AD6 and AC6).

I had the smart compilation option turned on when I successfully
compiled and tested the design. So when I move 8-bit signals to new
pin locations it should be as easy as a few top-level re-wiring. No
need to recompile and re-fit the design.

However, the tool spent one hour re-do the whole synthesis and
fitting. Worst of all, the compiled the design does NOT work on FPGA
at all!

When I say "does NOT work at all", it means not only I cannot get
anything from the DAC0 pins, but also I cannot bootload the FPGA (I
have bootloader in the design) after I download the new design.

Somehow during the re-compilation, the bootloader (8051 processor,
intruction ROM and RAM) are affected, which should have nothing to do
with the 8 wires I changed at the top level.

Any help/suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Yi Zhang
ENQ Semi.

 

[H. Peter Anvin]

Followup to: <cd4a30b8.0309110632.7ee5a488@posting.google.com>
By author: enq_semi@yahoo.com (enq_semi)
In newsgroup: comp.arch.fpga

However, the tool spent one hour re-do the whole synthesis and
fitting. Worst of all, the compiled the design does NOT work on FPGA
at all!

When I say "does NOT work at all", it means not only I cannot get
anything from the DAC0 pins, but also I cannot bootload the FPGA (I
have bootloader in the design) after I download the new design.

Somehow during the re-compilation, the bootloader (8051 processor,
intruction ROM and RAM) are affected, which should have nothing to do
with the 8 wires I changed at the top level.

Try removing the db directory and recompiling.

-hpa
--
<hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private!
If you send me mail in HTML format I will assume it's spam.
"Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."
Architectures needed: ia64 m68k mips64 ppc ppc64 s390 s390x sh v850 x86-64

 

[enq_semi]

Try removing the db directory and recompiling.

-hpa

I think the title I used was not accurate: it should be "smart
compilation did not SAVE my design".

The fact it runs for more than one hour can only mean that Quartus did
recompile everything (even the design has no change except 8 wires and
I didn't remove the db directory).

So, let me redefine my questions:
1. Why with "smart compilation" turned on it still recompiles
everything?
2. Why the compilation didn't work after I moved 8 wires?

thanks!

Yi

 

[Mike Treseler]

enq_semi wrote:

So, let me redefine my questions:
1. Why with "smart compilation" turned on it still recompiles
everything?

"Smart Compilation" just means save the cache files
in case they can be reused. It doesn't make the cache
any more likely to be reusable. That is a function
of device utilization, routing strategy and the
impact of the design change.

2. Why the compilation didn't work after I moved 8 wires?

-- Maybe "didn't work" means
"routed successfully, but did not function correctly"

When you gamble by making design changes on the back end,
sometimes you lose. Consider making all design changes
at the front end and rerunning your functional sim
and synthesis before place+route.

-- Maybe "didn't work" means "did not route successfully"

When device utilization is high, changing even one
pin can lose you the route.


-- Mike Treseler

 

[Ben Twijnstra]

Hi Yi,

When I say "does NOT work at all", it means not only I cannot get
anything from the DAC0 pins, but also I cannot bootload the FPGA (I
have bootloader in the design) after I download the new design.

Somehow during the re-compilation, the bootloader (8051 processor,
intruction ROM and RAM) are affected, which should have nothing to do
with the 8 wires I changed at the top level.

Any help/suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Yi Zhang
ENQ Semi.

Doesn't look good. What version of Quartus are you running? 2.2 or 3.0? Did
you later retry using a normal compile, and did that work?


Best regards,



Ben

 

[H. Peter Anvin]

Followup to: <cd4a30b8.0309120454.734ddc0a@posting.google.com>
By author: enq_semi@yahoo.com (enq_semi)
In newsgroup: comp.arch.fpga

Try removing the db directory and recompiling.

-hpa

I think the title I used was not accurate: it should be "smart
compilation did not SAVE my design".

The fact it runs for more than one hour can only mean that Quartus did
recompile everything (even the design has no change except 8 wires and
I didn't remove the db directory).

So, let me redefine my questions:
1. Why with "smart compilation" turned on it still recompiles
everything?
2. Why the compilation didn't work after I moved 8 wires?

I have found that changing a file while a compile is in progress (at
least across a network; haven't tried it on the same machine) messes
up the dependency generation in smart compile.

The other thing is that if *any* logic changes it has to re-run the
fitter, which at least for my designs is 60% of the compile time.

However, if the only thing that has changed is .mif files, smart
compile can take the time down from 15 minutes to 15 seconds and
such, since all it needs to re-run is the assembler.

-hpa
--
<hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private!
If you send me mail in HTML format I will assume it's spam.
"Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."
Architectures needed: ia64 m68k mips64 ppc ppc64 s390 s390x sh v850 x86-64

 

[Vaughn Betz]

enq_semi@yahoo.com (enq_semi) wrote in message news:<cd4a30b8.0309110632.7ee5a488@posting.google.com>...

Hi, there,

I have a design contains 12K logic cells and 300K bit memories and
runs at 5MHz. I compiled it for an EP20K1500 device and it worked
(tested on FPGA).

Then I wanted to switch 8 output bits from pin location AF1, AF2, AF3,
AF4, G4, G5, G6 and H2 to DAC0 pins (AE1, AD1 -- AD6 and AC6).

I had the smart compilation option turned on when I successfully
compiled and tested the design. So when I move 8-bit signals to new
pin locations it should be as easy as a few top-level re-wiring. No
need to recompile and re-fit the design.

However, the tool spent one hour re-do the whole synthesis and
fitting. Worst of all, the compiled the design does NOT work on FPGA
at all!

When I say "does NOT work at all", it means not only I cannot get
anything from the DAC0 pins, but also I cannot bootload the FPGA (I
have bootloader in the design) after I download the new design.

Somehow during the re-compilation, the bootloader (8051 processor,
intruction ROM and RAM) are affected, which should have nothing to do
with the 8 wires I changed at the top level.

Any help/suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Yi Zhang
ENQ Semi.

Hi Yi,

There seem to be two issues here. First, you're wondering why it
takes so long for smart recompile to occur after you move some pins.

The smart recompile feature in Quartus skips only entire steps in the
compilation process that aren't needed. So if you move pins, it knows
that your design does not need to be re-synthesized & mapped, but it
does need to be re-placed and routed (fit). So you still wind up
paying the CPU time for a full place and route, even though you moved
only a few pins.

To speed things up, you can back-annotate your design to LABs before
you recompile. Back-annotate, move the pins you want to move, and
recompile. It will now be a lot faster, since your logic is locked
down, so placement is trivial. It will still need to be routed and
timing analyzed though, but it should still be 3x or so faster to
compile.

Our most recent families (Stratix and Cyclone) have two other features
that help speed up recompiles like this -- incremental fitting, and
back-annotated routing. Unfortunately they won't help you with an
APEX design.

Incremental fitting does what I think you want here -- just figure out
what changed in the design, and make only the changes needed to
re-place and route those changes.

An alternative (again only for Stratix & Cyclone) is back-annotated
routing. This lets you back-annotate your design, including routing,
move the pins you want, and recompile. Now the placement is trivial,
and most of the routing is re-used too, so the compile time is much
faster.

Now for your second issue: why did your design not work after a smart
recompile? I can think of two possibilities:

1. There is some dangerous timing in your design (race conditions,
asynchronous transfers without handshaking, transfers between clock
domains without timing constraints, etc.). By re-placing and routing
your design, a race condition that was latent may have become a
problem.

2. Something strange happened in the smart recompile. As another
poster suggested, try deleting the db/ subdirectory before
recompiling. This will force a full recompile with no information
re-use. If that fixes your problem, I'd be interested to hear the
details so I can open a bug report on this.

Hope this helps.

Vaughn
Altera