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get the fitter to stop after placement (i.e. not do routing)

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Hi, does anybody know how to get the fitter to place a design but not route it? 

 

I'd like to sweep across a bunch of fitter seeds and dump out the placement (using backannotation to produce set_location entries in the qsf file). We have some design-specific heuristics that are better at catching unroutable placements than quartus is on its own. 

 

Unfortunately the router takes a very very long time for our design. If I simply kill the fitter after it declares that placement is finished it doesn't write the placement data into the database, so attempting backannotation gives me the "you need to run the fitter" error. 

 

Any ideas on how to place but not route? 

 

Thanks!
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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As far as I know, the only way to do this currently is to use Quartus Prime Pro Edition with an Arria 10 device. The Compilation Dashboard includes a multi-stage Fitter to allow for optimizations at each stage of the process, including before routing.

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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As far as I know, the only way to do this currently is to use an Arria 10 device. 

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Wow that certainly stinks. We're way, way, way past the "pick a different chip" stage.
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
331 Views

Why not raise a ticket directly with altera about it - they may be able to come up with a solution?

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
331 Views

 

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Why not raise a ticket directly with altera about it - they may be able to come up with a solution? 

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All the usual reasons... they seem annoyed by my industry's bursty purchasing patterns -- aside from samples we make only one (huge) purchase about every three years. Not as bad as X though, who keep asking about projected "quarterly" puchasing volumes over and over and seems oblivious to the fact that their products can be used for anything other than embedded glue logic. 

 

I'm resigned to the fact that because of this we can't rely on our FPGA vendors for any serious support. I confess that I do not even know how to "raise a ticket" with Altera although I guess I could email our sales rep... although he knows it's likely a year or more before our next purchase (= commission) so I'm guessing we are not a high priority for him right now. 

 

Thanks for trying though guys. :)
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
331 Views
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
331 Views

 

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All you need to do is create an account on myAltera 

https://www.altera.com/mal-all/mal-signin.html?resource=%2Fcontent%2Faltera-www%2Fglobal%2Fen_us%2Findex%2Fmyaltera%2Fmal-home.html&$$login$$=%24%24login%24%24&j_reason=unknown&j_reason_code=unknown 

 

Then you can raise a ticket in the "mysupport" section 

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Thanks Tricky, I will give it a try.
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