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[Altera_Forum]

I received this message: 

Fitter converted 3 user pins into dedicated programming pins. Later, it says that multiple pins are assigned to the same location and thus the place and route fails.   Does anyone know what the problem is?

[Altera_Forum]

It seems that you have assigned some pins for your inputs/outputs that are in fact reserved for the configuration device. Check your assignments, and that you specified the correct configuration memory type in the device settings.

[Altera_Forum]

What Daixiwen says is right, but my experience is that it may still fail. When using FPP on an Arria GX device, I needed to allocate all my IOs to fixed pins and avoid all the config pins (not just the ones I was using) to avoid the fitter crashing. I did file this as a bug with Altera but it probably isn't in a release version yet

[Altera_Forum]

I have a development board that came with some sample projects. If I open up the sample project, the place and route stage completes successfully by converting two user pins to dedicated programming pins. However, if I go to Assignments->Device->Device and Pin Options->Configuration and hit Okay without changing any settings, the fitter becomes a question mark and converts three user pins to dedicated programming pins on the subsequent run. That third pin causes a conflict and an error.

[Altera_Forum]

In the Device And Pin Options window, go to the "Dual-Purpose Pins" and check that the third pin is set to "Use as Regular I/O". 

 I experienced some Quartus crashes with those options too... On a Cyclone III project, when I set the programming device to EPCS, the DCLK pin to "Use as regular I/O", set the unused pins to "As input tri-stated with bus-hold circuitry", and forget to assign any output to the DCLK pin, then the assembler crashes (on Quartus 8.0 SP1). It took me some time to figure out the combination of parameters that were causing the crash. Maybe I should send a bug report too...

[Altera_Forum]

Thanks, that solved the problem.