How to manually place a component with Quartus II

You can add attributes in your HDL to prevent it from merging registers. This is useful when you have a register with a high fanout, so you want two separate registers. A VHDL example is below:

ATTRIBUTE maxfan                 : NATURAL;
ATTRIBUTE dont_merge             : BOOLEAN;
ATTRIBUTE noprune                : BOOLEAN;
ATTRIBUTE syn_keep               : BOOLEAN;
signal a,b,c : std_logic;
attribute maxfan of a : signal is 10;
attribute maxfan of b : signal is 5;
attribute dont_merge of a : signal is true;
attribute dont_merge of b : signal is true;
attribute dont_merge of c : signal is true;
...
--clocked process:
a <= ip;
b <= ip;
c <= ip;
--etc.