The question is really about vertical migration in the Cyclone VE family, U19 package. After extensive research of posts and pin conncetion guidelines, some pins marked NC in one density (K9 for example) are power pins for the smaller K4 device. (so strange there are more power connections in the smaller die) If NC pins are truly not connected to the die, I am confident to connect power to these pins where indicated for the smaller density package, and the vertical migration will be consistent with other Intel documentation. But if that is true, there is a glaring contradiction with the results from the Quartus vertical migration tool, which indicates leaving all power pins unconnected that are NC in some other devices in the migration capable family (causing the not properly powered device to fail). This is clearly a bug in Quartus that I would hope someone at Intel would be interested in.
