How to use signaltap in a bottom up flow

[Altera_Forum]

Hi, 

 Our lab is used to work without partitions on relativly smaller designs (compile time<1h). The last debugging steps are done with signaltap, a quick and flexible method. Most of the time we use it in presynthesis mode. It is rather hard to find the right nodes quickly in post fit mode... or does somebody has some tricks for that?  Anyway, now we have a bigger design wich will have to compile (much) longer. We splitted it up in partitions and will spend a lot of debugging cycles in one partition at a time while preserving the other partitions. Can we setup a presynthesis signaltap in a bottom up flow, only recompiling the partition of interest with a signaltap module and importing the others? And how to do that? Can signaltaps be merged over partitions?   I appricate any experiance with signaltap in combination with partitions  Using Q9.1   Kind regards,  Johannes

[Altera_Forum]

--- Quote Start ---  Hi,  Our lab is used to work without partitions on relativly smaller designs (compile time<1h). The last debugging steps are done with signaltap, a quick and flexible method. Most of the time we use it in presynthesis mode. It is rather hard to find the right nodes quickly in post fit mode... or does somebody has some tricks for that?  Anyway, now we have a bigger design wich will have to compile (much) longer. We splitted it up in partitions and will spend a lot of debugging cycles in one partition at a time while preserving the other partitions. Can we setup a presynthesis signaltap in a bottom up flow, only recompiling the partition of interest with a signaltap module and importing the others? And how to do that? Can signaltaps be merged over partitions?   I appricate any experiance with signaltap in combination with partitions  Using Q9.1   Kind regards,  Johannes  --- Quote End ---    Hi Johannes,  first of all it is not possible to define signaltap in a partition, which you would like to import in your toplevel. In my opion it should be possible to import all the partitions and define the signaltap on the toplevel. I would expect ( I will give it a try) that only the signaltap and the routing to the choosen nodes will be done, but I'm not sure which preservation level you could use.   Kind regards  GPK

[Altera_Forum]

Hi Johannes, 

 I run some trials ( small project is attached). You should import all your partitions. After that you can specify in signaltap the nodes (choose post-fitting) you need. Only signaltap itself and the connection to the nodes will be new routed. You can find a good overview about the perservation level in the compilation report:  Fitter -> Incremental Compilation Section -> Incremental Compilation Preservation Summary   Kind regards   GPK

[Altera_Forum]

Thanx, 

 You're info is very helpfull!  Next thing i'll do is getting used to post fit signaltapping. Iwill also do a feature request for pre-synthesis signaltapping in a partition i think it would be very usefull and convince a lot of people to do design partitioning.  Kind regards,  Johannes

[Altera_Forum]

--- Quote Start ---  Thanx,  You're info is very helpfull!  Next thing i'll do is getting used to post fit signaltapping. Iwill also do a feature request for pre-synthesis signaltapping in a partition i think it would be very usefull and convince a lot of people to do design partitioning.  Kind regards,  Johannes  --- Quote End ---    Hi Johannes,  you can't use pre-synthesis nodes for signaltap in an imported partition. Pre-synthesis means that you need the sources files , but with the import you only get a netlist. When you try to do that, Quartus asked you to change the netlist type to source file. It will lead to an error.  Do you have a team-based design ? That means that the designer are working on their module and the modules are integrated later on. If not, you can define the partitions in your Projekt directly. This would gives you the option to use the source files (pre-synthesis) for signaltap.  Kind regards  GPK