Meet QuartusIQ
Quartus® Prime (Pro Edition, 26.3) introduces the QuartusIQ AI Expert Companion, bringing FPGA expertise and project-aware AI assistance directly into your design workflow. Get guidance where you work, explore design decisions, and connect knowledge with hands-on tasks. Alongside new capabilities in system design, power analysis, and embedded development, QuartusIQ creates a more connected FPGA development experience.
QuartusIQ: FPGA Expertise, Closer to Your Design
QuartusIQ integrates AI assistance directly into the Quartus GUI, providing access to FPGA knowledge and project-aware guidance within your design environment. You can ask questions, explore design recommendations, and find relevant information without leaving Quartus.
- QuartusIQ connects to supported LLM providers using your own API key.
Beyond general-purpose AI assistance, QuartusIQ combines FPGA-specific knowledge with project summaries to help make questions and recommendations more relevant to your design. Whether you're learning a new tool in Quartus, looking for documentation, or investigating approaches to design closure, this context can help you identify useful next steps.
QuartusIQ also supports practical programming and configuration tasks.
- Analyze and convert programming files, discover connected hardware, and program devices through JTAG.
- Supports Secure Device Manager (SDM) commands, QSPI compatibility checks, and Remote System Update (RSU) image generation, extending these capabilities to additional device-configuration tasks.
For teams exploring AI-assisted development beyond the Quartus GUI, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration makes QuartusIQ expertise accessible to external AI workflows. And there is also an extension for Visual Studio Code that lets QuartusIQ work with GitHub Copilot.
- MCP integration and agent capabilities are available, providing additional ways to incorporate FPGA-specific knowledge and tools into connected development environments.
Together, these capabilities make QuartusIQ a companion for finding information, understanding your project, and completing tasks, with recommendations you can review and apply to your design.
Visual Designer Studio: Keep the System in View
Visual Designer Studio (VDS) expands Platform Designer system import to include generic components and parameterized RTL, allowing more of your existing design to be incorporated into a visual workflow. Cross-probing between VDS and other Quartus applications makes it easier to navigate between the system-level view and related design information.
- Clock/reset fanout simplifies logical hierarchies.
- Improved separation of source and generated files makes revision control easier to manage.
- Expanded support for Arria 10, Cyclone 10 GX, and Stratix 10 devices provide greater design flexibility.
- Board awareness (beta) introduces board-package creation and use within VDS, adding board-level context to the system-design environment.
Power & Thermal Analyzer: Streamline Power Analysis Workflows
Power analysis is most valuable when it's integrated into the design process. With Tcl scripting and example scripts, Power & Thermal Analyzer makes it easier to automate analysis workflows, maintain consistency, and reassess power consumption as designs evolve.
Several usability enhancements simplify working with device resources and analysis results.
- Device-aware resource filtering and controls help prevent invalid actions, while improved device selection, graphical displays, and numeric alignment make the interface easier to navigate.
- Common power-analysis reports are now available in the Report Database, providing access to power-analysis results within a familiar reporting environment.
- HPS is also modeled as a resource rather than a global setting, making its treatment more consistent with other design resources.
Embedded Development: Expanded Platform Support and Design Examples
Quartus Prime (Pro Edition, 26.3) expands embedded development support with the following:
- Initial Agilex® 27 SoC Hard Processor System (HPS) enablement, including Simics support and baseline hardware and software reference designs.
- For Agilex 5 E-Series devices, expanded FreeRTOS support includes Cortex-A76 symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) capabilities, along with the re-release of the bare-metal library.
- New Agilex 5 E-Series design examples help developers explore a wider range of embedded architectures. These include heterogeneous Linux and FreeRTOS operation using Bao static partitioning, cache-coherent accelerator examples for both operating systems, and Ubuntu and Docker-based Linux configurations. A new bare-metal "Hello World" example provides a simple starting point for development.
- Updated Nios V design examples include Triple-Speed Ethernet (TSE) designs with FreeRTOS TCP/IP and web-server functionality for Agilex 3 and Agilex 5 devices. Additional enhancements include initial Agilex 27 Nios enablement and soft-processor debug module improvements.
Additional Productivity, DSP Builder Machine Learning, and Device Support Enhancements
Node Finder improvements include a persistent top-level hierarchy, single-click navigation, and side-by-side search results, making it easier to explore a design while maintaining context.
DSP Builder expands machine-learning capabilities with new CNN layers, expanded activation-function support, and AI Tensor DSP optimizations. Enhanced network import, quantization, and automatic sizing simplify implementation, while new demos and MATLAB/Simulink MCP-based agentic workflows support model creation, updates, and verification.
Device enablement also expands for Agilex 5 E-Series and D-Series, including additional temperature-grade support for Agilex 5 D-Series devices.
AI models with FPGA AI Suite
FPGA AI Suite 26.3 expands the tools and capabilities available for developing and integrating AI workloads.
- Beta features include spatial compiler and developer APIs that enable customers to build CNN and transformer models with examples (ResNet-8, Qwen 3.5, Majika, GPT-neo), and configurable external memory interface (EMIF) connectivity.
- Additional updates include a new Altera Model Zoo, better integration with the
- Altera Video and Vision Processing, SoC/x86 profiling, and VDS examples.
- New production-quality design examples for Agilex 3 Memory-to-Memory designs.
These additions provide more options for model exploration, data-path integration, and performance analysis.
Explore Quartus Prime (Pro Edition, 26.3)
From project-aware AI assistance to enhancements in system design, power analysis, embedded development, and AI workloads, Quartus Prime Pro 26.3 provides new capabilities for your FPGA projects.
Visit the Quartus Prime Pro website to learn more.
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