Need Ideas To Help With Timing Closure? - Try 'Report Timing Closure Recommendations'

[Altera_Forum]

Just wanted to let people know about a feature we've recently released in Quartus II to help users get ideas on how to attack their timing closure problems. It analyzes whatever paths you ask it to and tries to determine what common causes of timing failure may be impacting your design by leveraging knowledge of the internals in the CAD flow and give you very specific recommendations to act on (e.g. 'you should duplicate node 'x' because it appears to be making the path difficult to place). 

 The idea is to give the designer insight into what may be happening, and help them pinpoint parts of their HDL that may be worth focusing on. The recommendations are meant to be read by someone who knows the HDL and should help provide direction on things to try when you're stumped on how to proceed with timing closure.  It's available in 10.1 and beyond, and you can access it from TimeQuest by clicking on the "Report Timing Closure Recommendations" task. You can find more details in the Quartus handbook section on 'Area and Timing Optimization', see the section on "Debugging Timing Failures in the TimeQuest Analyzer".  Another little feature is the 'Extra Fitter Information' tab that now appears in the TimeQuest GUI for any path you're looking at. It gives you some helpful information on each node on the path (e.g. what design partition it is in, any location or region constraints on the node and if so where they came from, etc.) and it also gives you a thumbnail view of the placement (and routing if you used the 'show_routing' option when reporting timing on the path). This is handy for eye-balling the placement and routing to see if anything crazy is going on.  If anyone has tried it, I'd appreciate any feedback and if you haven't, please give it a try and let us know how it works for you and how we can improve it in the future.  Thanks,  Shawn

[Altera_Forum]

You can find more information on this feature by searching for "Report Timing Closure Recommendations" in the Quartus II handbook at http://www.altera.com/literature/hb/qts/qts_qii52005.pdf