HC4GX15 Datasheet, PDF (191/668 Pages) Altera Corporation – HardCopy IV Device Handbook

Chapter 1: HardCopy IV Design Flow Using the Quartus II Software
1–23
Engineering Change Order (ECO)
When making changes to your design in a companion revision, use the Compare
HardCopy Companion Revisions feature in the Quartus II software to ensure that
your Stratix IV and HardCopy IV designs match functionality and compilation
settings. You must perform this comparison after both Stratix IV and HardCopy IV
designs are compiled and before you hand off the design to the Altera HardCopy
Design Center. Figure 1–15 shows how to navigate to the companion revisions
comparison. On the Project menu, point to HardCopy Utilities and click Compare
HardCopy Companion Revisions.
Figure 1–15. Compare HardCopy Companion Revisions
Engineering Change Order (ECO)
During the last stage of the design cycle, it is critical to implement a specific portion of
the design, without affecting the rest of its logic. As described in the previous section,
Incremental Compilation can implement and manage certain partitions of the design,
and preserve the optimization results for the rest of the design. However, this
becomes difficult to manage because Engineering Change Orders (ECOs) are often
implemented as last-minute changes to your design.
The Quartus II software provides the Chip Planner tool and the Resource Property
Editor for ECO operations to shorten the design cycle time significantly. For the
HardCopy development flow, ECOs occur in the Stratix FPGA revision and you make
the changes directly to the post place-and-route netlist. When you switch to the
HardCopy ASIC revision, apply the same ECOs, run the timing analysis and
assembler, perform a revision compare, and then run HardCopy Netlist Writer for
design submission.
© January 2010 Altera Corporation
HardCopy IV Device Handbook, Volume 2