Fmax

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within 1% of Fmax it could save me maybe two days of re-compiling.[/b]

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On slow PC - Celeron 900MHz(typical 950, but decreased for lower power) and 384Mb RAM, system for slowest CycloneII 2C8F256-8 fitted within 30 min.

Enable in quartus fitter settings most physical resynthesis options, such as

comb. logic and register retiming. Set effort to extra.

Set router optimisation level to maximum and placement effort to 3.0.

This settings can help increase fmax up to 15%.

On 2C8F256-8 NiosII/s without multipler can work up to 85MHz, and with multipler up to 75 MHz(timings based on timing analyser).

Find in timing analyser critical path. If critical path outside NiosII core, then place slow device on separate clock domain.

Quartus can work faster with more system memory. PC must have more than 1 Gb RAM, 512 Mb for windows xp and other for quartus.